Dynamic Power Roll Chances

[The Masked Orange]

Long one, apologies. Put it down to excitement for the game nearly being out. Years of Wrestling Spirit games and other games like XCOM have taught me that missing the 1/6 dice roll against you is not bad game design, it's working perfectly as intended. Our monkey brains don't like dealing with chance and probabilities, and I hope this is a genuine critique and not a monkey brain moment.

 

One thing that is potentially a bit frustrating in CBU is that sometimes you end up in a loop where you've rolled a lot of dice for not much to happen. Say you're trying an attack which requires a 3-6 roll to activate, you then need a 4-6 roll to close the distance, you then need to pass the 2d6 roll, you then need to pass the enemy's 4-6 roll ability to completely dodge the move. There's a lot of moving parts and there's a really good chance you're rolling a lot of dice to achieve nothing.

 

That's part of the game, and that's just tactics. Don't prioritise the thing that requires flipping a coin heads four times in a row, don't be surprised when it doesn't work. What does make some of those loops a bit frustrating however is they don't change throughout the course of an encounter, it's just as bad a decision turn 18 as it was turn 1, and that's fine as a hail mary mechanic (like the leap of faith for puzzles) but if it's your only chance of doing any real damage to a particular enemy (say they have damage modifiers that mean you need to hit them with a physical move with at least 3 damage to actually decrease their health by one, something like that) it starts to leave that realm of 'tactics' and into that realm of looking at dice for forty seconds and nothing doing.

 

I think there being a couple more dynamic scenarios that change some of these dice rolls to encourage things happening could help with that particular gameplay loop. Say, you've wittled down the opposing side to one villain, but that villain is a ranged character in a defensive position that has a far superior ranged defence stat (this is often the case with people you aren't able to take out early on), there's a good chance in the current scenario you're praying that dice rolls go in your favour so that you can maybe draw them out of position, and if you can't get those rolls it's basically a staring contest until somebody on either side can make something happen.

 

There's two ways I could see making that situation more dynamic. The first would essentially be to add a modifier to make it harder for characters to maintain defensive dominance if they are overwhelmed. If any side is outnumbered 3-1, or if one side has only one person left and are outnumbered 2-1, then rolls regarding closing the distance are now in the favour of those with the numbers (maybe a 3-6 instead of a 4-6) to represent the battlefield advantage the more numerous side has and to reward a side for 'winning' the fight up until that point. This would also likely benefit villains more than heroes as from what I've seen minion spawners are almost entirely villains and so villains are more likely to create numerical advantages before any last man standing situations arises.

 

The other way I think these situations could be made more dynamic is by having certain rolls have an increasing chance of working if done by successive characters. Five characters in a row all having a 50/50 chance of closing the distance on a ranged character seems a bit illogical, as each character's actions should be impacting the entire state of play, and an entire side being coordinated towards one goal should have a greater chance of happening than individual skirmishes across a battlefield. So, with a roll like closing distance maybe each successive character gets a better chance, so maybe character one has a 4-6 roll to close the distance, but the second character is coming from a different angle now so has a 3-6 roll, and the third character represents that ranged position being swarmed so we're now on a 2-6 roll, and we stick with that 2-6 roll until that person is out of cover. This could also apply to dodge rolls for both heroes and villains (even in a comic book Spider-Man can only dodge so much before the sheer number of laser bullets on the page render his spidey-senses a delay to getting hit rather than a counter). It could also be implemented as an extra dice outcome. Say on closing the distance, a 4-6 is a success, a 1-2 is a failure but rolling a 3 gives a boost to any following characters that turn (on the next turn 3-6 is a success and rolling a 2 would give this boost again etc).

 

I think I like ideas like this because they're not just 'make dice roll go my way please' mechanics for the sake of making the game easier, and that they would apply to both sides. Obviously these wouldn't be changes that could be implemented or balanced before release, but I think they could be fun ways of guiding encounters towards action and give some tactical variety for how to deal with situations where you're waiting for a dodge to miss or distance to be closed (or stop you from hiding behind a dodge roll yourself, here's looking at you Blue Wraith). The current game feels pretty well balanced to me, it's just those one or two fringe scenarios where it's hard for either side to make things happen.