RADIANT TACTICS

Today, we’ll look at how Radiant Tactics nudges players to play tactical battles in a fun manner. This is the third article in a series looking at how great tactics RPGs use their game systems to add to tactical battles. Here is a short recap of initial findings:

1. Game Systems Empower Players to Personalize, Author, and Invest in Tac Battles. System interactions can empower players to personalize battles, authorship amplifying investment. Giving players tools isn’t automatically empowering them, however. Scenarios and tutorials need 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 a ‘strategic-optimizing’ player employs in battle. Broadly, tactics RPG designers should create incentives to play in fun manners and disincentives to play in unfun. 

3. Tac Battles are Instrumental to Fun in Other Systems. Tactical 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.

Let’s dig in!

The Problem

Perverse Incentives. Any tactics game whose tactical battles have consequences for progression, strategic map position, narrative direction, or game economy —essentially any tactics game that’s more than one-off battle— risks incentivizing players to play the battles in an unfun manner. Here are a couple examples of what that can look like: 

Baldur’s Gate 3, Pathfinder: To conserve spells, abilities, HP, and ammo, your party fights several battles where casters kite back casting cantrips. You’re winning, but it’s getting old and your fighters are bored.

Total War, Heroes III:  You’re ambushed on the campaign map. You win a challenging  tactical battle, but several squads of elite units are lost making a heroic stand. It was epic, but you’re considering reloading anyways — the campaign will become a slog to recover from the victory, and you’ll win faster fighting lopsided victory after lopsided victory.

Battletech: You’re early into a campaign with a squad of light and medium mechs, fighting a battle map. You’ve bad and good luck; two squads reinforced the target, but one contains a heavy mech you really want full savage for. Your desire for the heavy mech has you playing a miserable match — you’re reloading several turns back, as you try to find some way of winning an already challenging map while obtaining coveted salvage.

Radiant Tactics’ Solution

The short answer: there’s not really a solution. Game design is creative, messy, and hard. And fun comes in different flavors and modes, with gamers not uniform in preferences. 

Designing is more often a process of uncovering and choosing among tradeoffs—choosing prudently and for an audience’s preferences— than it is a method for discovering a single ‘correct’ answer, the solution. 

Yet, Radiant Tactics aspires to be a Tactic RPG system for hobbyist designers. So, that means we need to do our best to make designing easier and more foolproof, while still respecting those limits. Here’s what we’re working on to help with tha.:

Clarifying Fun in Tactics RPGs. If fun Tactics RPG play is what you’re trying to design for, it helps to think about what exactly you’re trying to accomplish. Precisely in what ways are Tactics RPGs fun? 

BP Pointing. We’ve designed a BP (Battle Potential, Battle Points) pointing system that’s both a tool for designers and a target that nudges players into playing tactical battles in fun manners. 

Developing and Sharing an Ordinary Craft of Tactics RPG Design. For the hobbyist scenario designer, we want to pool knowledge and experience around best practices, techniques, and common mistakes. To do so, we’re first blogging about game and scenario design to a hobbyist audience, while drafting other resources. If a community grows, then we might eventually find new ways of sharing and teaching design know how.

Of course, these are all areas of work-in-progress and discovery, but we’re excited to start sharing tools and insights developed so far.

Fun in Tactics RPGs

Scenario design is a craft whose goal is to produce a scenario that is fun for players to play. But what does that mean exactly for a tactics RPG?  While people have fun in different ways, here’s our own perspective on modes of fun Tactics RPGs support:

Five Forms of Fun in Tactics Battles

Challenge. Does the map offer a challenging combat puzzle? Is it so easy to not be worth playing through, or so impossible to be pointless? Challenge is relative to player skill levels, with audience a factor in finding right mean in  fun of challenge .

Immersion, World Fit. Gee, this Gaurdonia Ranger squad that patrols the pass to Nomos sure seems to be encountering monsters from continents away, characters from different time-lines, and rare, elite squads every other battle. Poor world-fit can break the fun of immersion and role-playing.

Player Autonomy, Agency. Do you need to take calculated risks, make interesting choices, interact and respond to the opposing force’s tactics? Or can your force auto-pilot itself to victory with no real decisions? The fun of making interesting tactical decisions is pretty distinctive to solid  tactics RPGs.

Practicality, Convenience, Usability. Constantly referencing rules, pieces that are hard to read and move, calculation intensive action resolution: when a game is unfun because impractical, it’s like a rock in your shoe ruining the walk, or too-tight pants becoming a distraction. The fun of convenience, enabled by elegant mechanics, good UI, or intuitive art, is often more transparent, in what you’re not experiencing due to it.

Variety and Pacing. Grinding mindlessly many easy battles, slogging stressfully through many challenging: series of tactical battles can be fun or unfun because of variety and pacing. 

There’s a lot a scenario designer can do to craft experiences for players that are fun in these manners. But what about other players? What can designers do to keep other players from making the game unfun?

How BP Pointing Nudges Players to Play in Fun Manners

Radiant Tactic’s BP pointing system is ostensibly like D&D’s challenge rating, Warhammer 40k’s points, or Battletech’s BV systems. Under the hood though, Radiant Tactics is trying to achieve something different. (We think—those are all proprietary models; we don’t actually know their pointing assumptions, principles, and formulas, so can’t say for sure how different their goals are.)

Radiant Tactics’ BP pointing system is loosely premised around Goodhart’s Law, which observes ‘when a measurement becomes a target, it fails to be a good measurement.’ ELO, a player skill ranking developed for Chess and used elsewhere, offers an example. When ELO is not used as part of matchmaking, it can, more or less, be an effective measure of player skill. Yet, when used as part of matchmaking, players will change their behaviors so as to get a better ranking by ELOs standard: players will dodge matches vs lower ranked players, play less frequently when higher ranked, win trade, and such.  The measurement becomes a target and, on the whole, players begin to behave differently so to game the system.

Radiant Tactics’ BP pointing attempts to lean into this principle. The thing is, we want players to behave differently, when that means opting to play in a more fun manner: to take interactive units over uninteractive, or take world-fitting squads over immersion breaking, and so on. So, we’ve set out to design Radiant Tactics’ BP pointing system as a poor measurement that’s useful as a fun-promoting target. 

Here’s how it works. BP is a simplified measure of a unit’s total utility towards winning battles. Unit utility falls into three categories:

1. Core. The value of winning the tactical battle by holding objectives, maneuvering, and surviving on board.
2. Offensive. The value of removing units from the board.
3. CC.  The value of negating the opposition’s investment in offensive or core utility.

Spending BP on units is like investing. There are risks and returns. Spending BP on a fragile unit that returns its BP price only after surviving five turns is risky. The BP system nudges players into treating units like investments, taking units based on what they expect can make good returns on that investment.

BP is not designed to be a good measure. If it were, we’d want to point units so that BP costs of the unit are to some extent predictive of match outcomes. That would be hard to do when players of different skills can use the same units to greatly different effects.

To the extent that Radiant Tactics’ BP pointing system is measure, it is a very simplified one. The pointing assumes units are played with the same basic ‘move everything forward and attack’ strategy no one outside a game AI is likely to play them with. (So, perhaps, BP is accurate under circumstances that rarely obtain.) Other simplifications baked into unit costs assume:

• Units that paid BP to survive two turns survive two turns.
• Units target defensive profiles that generate best returns for BP investment.
• Both squads move at each other outside of cover, with melee units not getting any use of offensive investment till turn 2.5.
• No units use interruptible phased attacks.

The virtue of baking such assumptions into unit costs as part of the pointing model is that it creates space for players to outperform, through skilled gameplay, the expected unit performance. Players are great at figuring out what units are good investments at higher skill. And, given that players can figure out which units are under- and over- performing investments, this means we as designers can nudge players into taking fun-conducive units through how we point them!

For example, take a unit that can use phased attacks —an interactive, interruptible, dramatic in-game choice. Since the BP model doesn’t price in the utility of phased attacks, such a unit, in the hands of a skilled player, will likely perform better than the unit’s BP cost assumes. The gamer savvy on which units are ‘underpriced’ should discover this and see the BP efficiency value of opting into taking a more interactive unit. Likewise, a skilled player might also discover that she can keep a low survival investment unit alive longer than the model assumes — for her skill level, it’s BP cost is a bargain. 

These sorts of  behaviors, not general predictions, are what the BP system is actually designed for. Fun units should be BP-economically appealing to take, so players, without hard limits on what units they are allowed to take, will nevertheless opt for taking squads that avoid extreme unfun compositions.

Or, so at least, that’s what Radiant Tactics attempts to achieve with its BP system design — to nudge players into playing with interactive and world-fitting squads! To express it another way, BP pointing is designed to allow Radiant Tactics to shift a unit’s investment profile, where that units falls on an axis of low/high risk and low/high reward.  

	Low Risk	High Risk
High Reward	Fun, Interactive, Immersive Units
Low Reward		Unfun, Uninteractive, Immersion Breaking Units

Some units tend towards an axis purely through their stats and abilities — indirect artillery tend to be easy to play safely, often hiding in terrain permitting little interaction. BP pointing allows pointers to add performance risks to unit investment. By increasing BP costs, you can make it so that, even in ideal conditions, indirect artillery only breaks even with its offensive investment. For the sake of the fun of variety, we don’t want to entirely eliminate indirect fire from play, just make it a choice that a player might think twice about.

Conclusion

We’ve much more to say about fun in tactics RPGs. Our final blog in this series will return to the topic, looking at how tactical battle outcomes have fun consequences for other  Radiant Tactics game elements. 

We’re also excited to open the hood of the BP pointing model even further, to get crunchy with those who might enjoy it and help spot errors in our math. Another thing we like about targets over measures? Unlike good measures, you can make them public. To preserve usefulness as a measure, projects will blackbox their models, since it’s harder, though not impossible, to game a measurement if you’re not sure how it is calculated.

 Targets, in contrast, work better when people understand the models presumptions. By balancing for fun with a target model, Radiant Tactics aspires to be more transparent with our models assumptions and formula. The whole point of a BP balance system is to make tactical battles more fun, which means inventing a BP system that disincentivize players to play unfun manners. We’ll take all the help we can get achieving that!

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!