Since we added the Swashbuckling Combat System we’ve talked a fair bit about the high concept for the system: a cinematic, fast paced, sword fighting system. Today I’m going to talk about the details of our implementation of that system.

The Swashbuckling System is built around Defenses, Combat Pools, and Skills. There are three defenses: Block, Dodge, and Parry; three Combat Pools: Health, Initiative, and Balance, and a huge number of Skills (more than 200 at this point). All three of these systems working together produce our Swashbuckling System. Today I’m going to talk about the Defenses and Combat Pools, and I’ll talk more about skills in part two.

When we designed the Swashbuckling System, we decided to make the basic defenses automatic. We feel there is too much uncertainty with regard to player connection speeds and reaction times to try and create a system where players are responsible for blocking every incoming blow. As a result, we give all characters a chance to first Parry, then Block, and finally to Dodge each incoming attack. Each of these defense types is equally effective in that they reduce the damage of an incoming attack to 0; however, they have secondary effects which make them significantly different.

Parry is the first line of defense, and the best result for the defender. If the defender Parries an attack he gains 5 Balance and 5 Initiative, and the attacker loses 10 Balance. The disadvantage of parry is that there are many types of attacks that bypass it, most notably attacks that target the Balance pool.

Block is the next defense, and the most neutral of the defenses. Block has no secondary side effects; it simply stops the incoming damage. There are a handful of attacks that cannot be blocked, most notably gunshots, but most attacks can be successfully blocked.

The final defense is Dodge. Dodge is the defense of last resort, and as such it is not a great result for the defender. If the defender dodges an incoming attack he loses 16 Balance. The upside of Dodge is that it works against virtually every attack.

Combat Pools are an abstract representation of your character’s status. The first, and most critical, combat Pool is Health. Your character’s Health is an abstraction of how much of a beating he can take and keep on fighting. It functions like hit points do in most games: as long as you have some left you’re ok. When your character reaches 0 he’s defeated; until that point he’s 100% combat effective. We talked about more complicated systems of declining effectiveness as you take damage, but ultimately decided that this was not an interesting place in the system to add complications.

There are two important things to note with regard to the Health Combat Pool. First, from a story perspective, your character is not actually killed when his health reaches 0. Swashbuckling is a cinematic system; in the movies nobody actually dies unless they’re scripted to do so. In your story, your character doesn’t die unless you script it to happen (by deleting your character). Until you make that choice your character is simply defeated, knocked out, captured, ransomed—you get the idea.

Second, while your Health may increase slightly through skill acquisition, you don’t experience the dramatic increase in hit points you see in many games. You will have roughly the same number of hit points at level 1 as you have at level 50. We did this as part of our efforts to allow players of disparate levels to effectively fight against each other.

The second Combat Pool is Initiative. Initiative represents your character’s momentum in the combat. Your character’s Initiative starts at 0 and increases during combat through the use of skills. Other skills, including many of the more powerful skills, require that you spend Initiative in order to activate them. Initiative decays over time, both in and out of combat, so you have to use it or lose it. There are a variety of skills and items you can acquire to reduce the rate of decay, but you cannot eliminate it entirely.

The final Combat Pool is Balance. Balance is the most commonly misunderstood of the Combat Pools. Your character’s Balance Pool is an overall representation of his defense. Mechanically your character’s chance to Block, Parry, or Dodge an incoming attack is scaled based on his balance. If he has zero Balance his defenses are reduced to their minimum (about 10% of their normal value). If he has 120 Balance his defenses are increased above their normal value (about 107% of their normal values, although the exact amount will be tuned as beta testing continues).

A character with full Balance is very hard, perhaps even impossible, to hit. So to be successful an attacker first needs to reduce his opponents Balance. To do this he uses skills, called Preparatory Attacks, designed to attack Balance directly. Balance regenerates quickly both in and out of combat (8 Balance per second for a starting character), so after reducing his opponent’s Balance the attacker will have only a fairly brief window to launch his attacks.

That covers the basics of Combat Pools and Automatic Defenses. Next time, I’ll talk about the different Fighting Schools and Skill Types.