I’ve always been allergic to ambiguity and other indefinite things. Nothing tips me over more than things and people that are vague. There is certainly a time and a place for philosophy, but what people don’t seem to understand is that it has nothing to do with being unclear. Also, luck is a concept to which I’m highly intolerant. I could go on forever about how everything in life is a roll of the dice, but that would bore me more than you. However, the beauty of text-based roleplaying, as it has been made clear to me, is its embrace of the ambiguous and the obscure. I can sympathize with this notion in regards to literary work, but not a forum on the internet. Text-based combat is very blunt at its core. You either defeat something or you are defeated yourself, which makes for a constant state of either 1 or 0. I realize that some people might think this a simplistic view, but when there is a Game Master that determines the outcome, this view is credible.

The problem that I’ve attempted to tackle begins and ends with the Game Master, and his subjective considerations of combat outcomes. For example, if you wrote the most amazing battle scene, which you were absolutely sure would destroy whatever opponents that your character faced, but the Game Master shot it down because his subjective judgment said that the scene was not enough, how would you feel? Some might say ‘disappointed,’ while others would say something patriotic akin to ‘I stand behind the Game Master’s (President’s) decision.’ The point here is that there will always be a conflict of opinion due to isolated and subjective interpretation, which is what I want to eliminate. Therefore, the goal was to create a predetermined point of reference that could nullify the shortcomings. If there is an agreed point of reference, our interpretations may differ, but our perception of the battle will be in accordance.

When I designed the system, I discovered that ambiguity was required in order to eliminate itself, not only because of its nature, but also because many roleplayers despise dice and numbers and other things that strangle their creative freedom. Therefore, my endeavor was to create something that would allow players to freely express themselves, but at the same time confine the space in which they could venture. The ‘stagger’ mechanic was inspired by Final Fantasy XIII’s combat system. In the game, the player can fill a meter and once it has been filled, all attacks against that enemy will be ‘critical hits’ and cause more damage. What I did was that I took this mechanic and changed the critical hits into ‘this enemy can be defeated.’ However, this was only the first part of the system—the easy part.

The difficult part of this system was: how do I measure ‘creative freedom,’ objectively? At first, I was at a total loss and nearly threw everything away. But, then I realized that I needed that ambiguity, which I hated so much, in order to defeat it. Therefore, I brainstormed the idea of ambiguous numbers that would function as gains towards the stagger meter. The numbers do not represent ‘health points’ or ‘attack damage,’ instead they’re an overall representation of the character and its author and their actions in combat. So, I began with something simple: physical attacks. When a character attacks an enemy with its weapon, it gets a base-stagger gain towards defeating that enemy. It doesn’t matter if the author roleplays it as hitting or missing the enemy, he still receives credit for the attempt. Then I added various combination bonuses such as aerial attacks, structure-combination, other player-combination, and so on. And, in order to reward that creative freedom, I devised ambiguous rewards that I could distribute at my leisure, however in predetermine values such as +5 or +10 which I could not alter or distribute more than once per action.

This mechanic on its own wasn’t enough. I had to devise a set of rules for interaction with enemies without having to control them myself. It’s an awfully painful and time consuming process when the Game Master has to speak and act for all enemies, and it also deprives the players of their creative freedom—having to leave their posts ‘open-ended,’ which is something that I would consider indefinite writing. Therefore, what I did was to create a set of extremely clear and determined rules for enemy behavior, which would not intrude (too much) upon the player’s creativity. The core rules became:

1. An enemy always keeps attacking whoever attacked it first.
2. An enemy never changes target unless provoked.
3. An enemy always retaliates after being attacked.

The first rule states that whoever attacked an enemy first controls that enemy and cannot attack anything other than whoever controls it—the player and the enemy are locked in a duel, of sorts. The second rule enforces the first rule by saying that the enemy will not change its behavior unless it is provoked by another player. Some might consider this to be an issue, but it is nullified by the third rule, which states that the enemy that a player is controlling always counter-attacks when it is attacked. Therefore, if a player attacks all enemies in order to control them (or if he wants to be a hero), he is going to die fairly quickly, as those enemies will only attack him. However, if this happens consciously, another player can still relieve the ‘hero’ by invoking the second rule and save him by shifting the attention of the enemies. These rules nullify ‘god-modding’ and encourage teamwork at the same time.

This became the core mechanic of the system, which allows me to objectively assess the outcome of battle scenes without (entirely) indulging in my subjective opinion. It also allows the players to truly explore their creativity without having to be concerned about such notions as ‘god-modding,’ as the system prevents it. The system also allows me to control the speed of battles, which can sometime persist much longer than they should because of whatever reasons. It also allows me to fairly easily add typical game aspects—such as items, status effects, and character attributes—without intruding upon creative freedom too much. All that these aspects do is to add bonuses to stagger gain or manipulate the rules of the system. For example, the “Commando” attribute adds a small bonus to overall stagger gains related to physical attacks and the “Darkness” status effect manipulates the third Enemy Behavior rule. The attributes are also a decent way for the author to express herself: “This is my character, and these are his strengths and weaknesses—deal with it!”