Survival of the fittest: Fighting in Beyond the Veil

When we set out to design the mechanics that drive the world of Beyond the Veil there was a very deliberate choice to avoid building a combat simulator. There are a lot of options for those who want complicated parry mechanics, hit locations, and mortal wounds… for us, it was more about capturing the frantic nature of a sudden escalation, that blind panic that normal people would feel when a yeti crashes out of the treeline and charges at your group of investigators.

As a narrative system, Beyond the Veil encourages the team to work together and leverage the various strengths of each individual to contain and control a combat situation and while they may, over time, grow to acquire a number of skills suitable for a skirmish, most Investigators will be untrained and even helpless in the face of a savage beast. As such, we don’t have ‘combat’, we have ‘fighting’. Combat suggests trained adversaries battling it out in a measured back and forth. Fighting on the flip side, is less controlled, even frantic in nature. While moral standing and ideology might come into play, fighting doesn’t include a sense of honour, it’s about survival and necessity.

Not everything is a fight.

Even when faced with a hostile entity it doesn’t have to result in violence. Through keen investigation and empathy the solution may be diplomacy or even providing support to reduce the hostility. Beyond the Veil actively encourages the initial fact-finding effort to understand the potential resolutions available to the Investigators. It is up to them to choose the optimal one that will bring the investigation to the most satisfactory end… even if it is just running away, far, far away!

Another consideration that needed to be covered was the fact that in a modern setting, with untrained fighters, everything could be a weapon. As a designer, I certainly didn’t want to have to codify every single item in the world… and beyond. The result was a simplified system based on the relative complexity of an item when used in a fight. The same goes for resilience and armour, simply beating a target number didn’t feel accurate enough a representation of the potential lethality of an attack.

Hitting versus hurting.

Whether swinging a chair leg as a makeshift club or wielding a razor sharp katana, even the most amateur combatant could make contact with the rampaging yeti. Their ability to do actual damage, however, is the real question. In Beyond the Veil we measure success when attacking in the same way we do for any other action, using a Reality Check. Meet or beat the target, set by the complexity of the ‘weapon’ and you’ve made contact with the enemy.

To understand the effect of the hit, we take the difference between the attack roll and the RC for the weapon complexity, apply the relevant multiplier and that is the potential damage dealt. The target still has a chance to resist that damage, whether through blocking, dodging, natural resilience, or armour, the effect is the same… roll a physical resistance check and reduce the damage by that amount, potentially even nullifying the damage dealt!

To account for the fact that even the most glancing of blows can still contribute to a victory, however, even fully resisted damage will always deal a minimum amount of minor Vitality damage to the target. A fight could turn into a war of attrition but should never be a complete stalemate.

Simple weapons are all about raw damage and effective in the hands of amateurs and experts alike. As weapons increase in complexity, however, they are harder to hit with, requiring more talent and skill to be effective. The trade off for a higher RC is a greater base damage, higher multiplier, and the ability to inflict conditions on the target makes the risk of missing a worthwhile consideration.

Controlling the chaos.

We wanted fights to be chaotic, frantic periods of play. Investigators get a single action (although movement is often considered free) and need to work together to strategise and control the battlefield. Utilising the various methods used throughout the game (i.e. Lend a hand, first aid, even flexible skills usage) is key to forming an effective team of survivors in the face of deadly opposition.

Violence is not the only option… but it is an option!

Avoiding conflict may be the difference between success and failure, pick your battles wisely and always do your research…

Uncover the Truth, Survive the Unknown.