BCZ Retrospective XVII: New Combination Upgrades

BCZ didn't introduce any new Extra Areas or Alternate Forms, so we're skipping straight to Combinations. I I tried to make new Extra Areas and new Transformation Upgrades, by the way, but they were kind of... Broken. That's a topic for another day, though.

So,Combiner Mecha. One of the many thorns in my side when trying to write a game that is both fun and also simple. I mentioned last time that the BCG version of the Combiner rules is very powerful and very flavorful, it was only missing mid-battle Combinations as a genre convention. This is where we pick up today.

Invincible Super Combination
Very, very late into the BCG development process (late enough that I knew we were going to be late in delivering the Kickstarter rewards), Super Combination was still the subject of much discussion. We kept going back and forth on whether it was worth it to sacrifice multiple HP pools and multiple attacks per round to make one super unit. The argument boiled down to two things: Whether your super robot army could replenish their resources by combining and the final Attributes of the Combined Unit.

This first issue was the trickiest one. Replenishing your Threshold, Oneshots, etc. is extremely powerful. If I balanced Super Combiners around, then I was stealth nerfing anyone who deployed precombined. I figured that many groups would rather simply do that, jumping straight to the payoff of their combined super robot than have to do the whole song and dance of battle in their weaker mechs while risking that one of them might explode. I didn't want to force that playstyle on them.

The second issue was simply a matter of numbers. Every time something about Super Combination changed, it was either too cheap at high Levels for the massive Attribute boost it granted or too expensive for the tiny Attribute bonus it granted at low Levels. This was just a matter of numbers though, so while it was certainly difficult, it wasn't a playstyle problem. Eventually one playtester suggested  adding a "Tax" to Super Combination that scaled according to the Level of the PCs to fix this problem, and I decided to make said "Tax" an Upgrade in itself... For the expansion.

There was a nonzero chance that baking this Tax into the core Super Combination rules would have unintended consequences and could break something. With only a few days until the final pdf files had to be sent to the printer to check for printing errors, I made the call to leave Combiners relatively underpowered (Yes, they were considered underpowered back then) and made a mental note to properly playtest Super Combiners with these additions in the expansion.

The story does not end here yet, however. ISC went through a few different versions, the stupidest being the one in which every Subpilot choose one of Might, Guard, Systems or Speed then gave that Attribute from their mech to the lead, resulting in a very flavorful insanely overpowered mess. The idea was that you could make the legs grant a Speed boost, the Torso a Guard boost, etc. But even when limiting this to 1 Area/Attribute per Subpilot and 4 Subpilots total, it still gave us Mechs with 20+ in every Attribute. We settled on a flat +1 to those four stats per Subpilot not long after the first few builds and never looked back.

And that is the story of ISC.

Universal Component
Universal Component (UC) had similar issues to ISC. We knew it was going to give Upgrades and Weapons, but we had to figure out if it healed both partners and if it granted any Attribute bonuses. The answer, by the way, was yes - sorta. The UC restores anything they've spent, but the lead doesn't. This encourages the UC to take risks and do combat on their own if they want to maximize the value they can get from their mech, but since they can combine with any PC (and if they go down the squad only lost 1 PC, not the whole Combiner) the risk of things going catastrophically wrong is much lower. You can still make a UC build that is pure support and deploys precombined, of course. It is probably weaker, but much safer as well as more generally useful.

That's it for both Combinations in BCZ. I'm okay with how they turned out, overall. There are some issues with Combiners where obviously the lead has the most fun out of everyone, but I don't think you can really fix that without giving each Subpilot loads of options and probably an element of chance, which would overly complicate a series of Upgrades that are already the most complex in the game. Ultimately, playing a Subpilot is for people who actually want to be a Subpilot, much like playing Healers is for people who enjoy playing them, not a role that people should be forced into.

As an anecdotical observation, I think that by now I've seen more NPC Combiners as Superbosses instead of actual parties with Combiner PCs. I'd be interested in hearing any experiences you may have with them!

Next: Design Flaws. Hooo boy.

Gimmick Out.