RADIANT TACTICS

Last time, we surveyed many of the best tactics RPGs and analyzed how they used game systems to add to their tactical battles.

Today, we’ll summarize how Radiant Tactics applies these learnings to its own game systems, starting with player personalization. We’ll focus on what’s novel about Radiant Tactics — where is something uncommon being tried, where is it attempting to innovate in the genre?

First, here is a short recap of three methods good tactics RPGs use:

1. Game Systems Empower Players to Personalize, Author, and Invest in Tac Battles. System interactions can empower players to personalize battles, with authorship amplifying investment. Giving players tools isn’t automatically empowering them, however. Scenarios and tutorials are needed to make players conscious of how they might use tools given
   
2. Game Systems Nudge Players to Play Tactical Battles in Fun Manners. System interactions can narrow or broaden the range of tactics an efficiency-optimizing player employs in battle. Broadly, tactics RPG designers should create incentives to play in fun manners and disincentives to play in unfun manners. 

3. Tac Battles are Instrumental to Fun in Other Systems. Tac battles are made more exciting through what becomes possible in other systems — exploration, crafting, class abilities, strategic map position, story and lore unlocks, and so on.

Onto personalization!

What’s Novel in Radiant Tactics’ Support for Player Personalization of Battles?

Tactics RPG players who enjoy role-playing characterful forces — a band of Robin Hoods vs brutal raiders—can be let down by game systems that fail to offer them choices that would meaningfully differentiate the two forces. You’re brutal raiders? Great, eliminate the town guards. Nobel bandits? Great, eliminate the town guards. Often, where there are choices, they are often in a narrative sequence, not in the common loops of the core tactical battles experience. 

Radiant Tactic tries to innovate with the genre and offer a different experience. And it all starts with player autonomy over encounter victory conditions. Opening up player authorship of victory conditions creates cascading impacts for player personalization and investment in other areas of the game. Consider:

Will you try to avoid, outmaneuver, and distract the town guards? Some units, equipment, spells, squad leaders will be more and less useful for accomplishing that strategy.

Will you try to take and hold the town square? You’ll find a completely different set of units, equipment, spells and such useful. 

Here is how it works in-game.

Personalize Victory. Players start tactical battles through their actions on a strategic map. A squad can choose an action, like ‘take and hold’, that includes both victory conditions and consequences for outcomes. Picking ‘take and hold’ is to commit to a capture point battle. Victory moves the opposition force from its strategic map tile. It’s a bit like Ogre Battle: each encounter has softer stakes than the ‘wipe or game over’ seen in other games, which, coupled with the game of strategic maneuver, means players will find themselves rolling with losses and adapting encounter level tactics as the broader strategic game state changes.

Personalize Tactics. Greater choice over when encounters are won opens up greater choice in how your force will. Want to role-play noble bandits? Players can! Just use the tactics a Robin Hood might use.

Radiant Tactics further supports such roleplaying through a combat system that offers a greater variety of options for offense than afforded by other game’s HP/DPS.

Radiant reimagines ‘damage’ in tactics RPGs with a simple to learn, hard to master, attack sequence. Attacks are simple, in that they’re resolved in basically two steps:

1. Batch roll an attack’s ‘damage’ — from those options, pick the effect you’ll try to inflict. 

2. Batch roll a defender’s defenses save. The effect is inflicted if the defender fails all their relevant saves. 

Players can enjoy the reimagined damage system simply by picking how their characters would choose to deal with foes from a bigger menu. Yet, under the hood, Radiant’s combat mechanics are a crunchy system, a one that rewards players who spend time mastering through play nuances in positioning, target selection, set up CC, charged interruptible attacks, and more. Radiant Tactics’ combat is a system that tries to ultimately offer players choices with different tradeoffs and risks, rather than a puzzle with one hidden right solution.

Personalize Your Team. Part of what is unique about Tactics RPGs in general is its greater focus on teams, rather than individuals. What can we accomplish when we band together, when each fully supports each? Radiant Tactics leans into this emphasis; “There are no heroes, only heroic peoples.”

We want players to create and have fun with their own heroic forces, to be able to play them characterfully and have fun playing on their own terms.  You can win the scenario with a bunch of noble bandits, and you’ll have fun looting, crafting, buying equipment that supports winning encounters with the methods noble bandits would use.

Choosing a playstyle means you’ll need to make choices about who’s part of your team. Subterfuge and stealth the modus operandis of your bandits, how will you approach the offer of support from heavily armored defender? Can you make the loud clumsy person work for your force? In this manner, supporting player personalization is in service of giving players challenges unique to their own style for playing the RPG. In the end, we hope you’ll think: there might have been different ways I could have won the scenario, but only this way fit my team’s playstyle, my team’s values, and my team’s character.

And that’s it for today! In the next blog, we’ll look at how Radiant Tactics keeps the game fun, and uses balance systems to nudges players to play in enjoyable manners. If you like this blog, consider signing up for updates, likes, or sharing content! Happy gaming!