One of the big stated goals of the MCDM RPG is going to be a system that avoids attrition-based gameplay.
To define terms:
D&D's 5th Edition has a number of ways in which, over the course of an adventuring day, your powers diminish. Spell slots, superiority dice, psionic energy dice, uses of Bardic Inspiration, Ki/Discipline Points, etc. are all limited resources that are spent to fuel player power. A Wizard can cast Fire Bolt all day long, but that 1d10, 2d10, 3d10, etc. is going to progress you somewhat slowly through a dangerous monster encounter - if you're facing off against a dozen battle-hardened orcs, you're going to get far closer to safety and a concluded fight if you burn that third level spell slot and fireball those guys rather than gradually picking them away 16.5 damage at a time (when you hit).
But there are a couple big consequences for this type of design:
First, you're incentivized to get to the "main event" as quickly as possible. Every side-path, every optional room, will drain your resources and make victory against your ultimate foe that much harder to attain.
Secondly, it means that the beginning of a fight is when the most impressive stuff goes off. In our orc scenario, getting off a fireball when they're all clustered together and your front-line fighters haven't engaged them in melee is great, but on the second round, you might find yourself hesitant to burn another 3rd level spell slot when these things are already weak enough to go down to one or two swings from the Paladin or are too enmeshed with your allies to make it feel safe.
So, the MCDM RPG intends to combat this in a couple ways:
The first is that you can't use your big, cool ability right at the start of a fight. From the Tactician, Fury, and Shadow that we've seen in playtesting, you need to amass some significant number (5 Insight for the Shadow's Assassinate ability) of your resources to do your big, flashy ability, which inevitably means that it's going to take a little while for you to get something like this off.
The other thing is, on a broader level, you come into a fight stronger based on how many fights you've been in during that adventure: Each encounter you win (including exploration, social, and combat encounters) will contribute to your Victories, and these will both give various class-based bonuses and also let you start a fight off with more resources.
Which actually means I kind of lied: if you are going into some big fight with six victories, you will be able to start things off with some nasty, expensive ability. And that's still going to probably be ideal because killing a monster will still be a good decision.
See, I think describing the game as it has been presented to us as not attrition-based isn't strictly true.
Health will still diminish as you fight monsters - they don't have to roll to hit either, and while classes have various triggered actions that can diminish the damage they take, I think it will be extremely unlikely and in some cases truly impossible not to take damage during a fight.
Still, there's a smoothing mechanic here, which is recoveries. Each character starts an adventure with a large number of Recoveries (I believe I saw one character sheet that, at level 1, had 10). You can spend these out of combat and, with the aid of certain abilities or taking your full turn, in combat, and they heal a flat third of your max health - a significant heal.
The idea, I think, is to make it easier to get back to full fighting strength and go into these fights in top shape.
But, this is an aspect of the game that does, truly, use attrition to create tension. With Recoveries allowing significant healing and resources being generated largely in-combat, the finite number of Recoveries you have becomes the limiting factor on your adventuring day (or period - the system tries to make the period between rests a less strictly circadian one).
We haven't seen this game's version of the Talent, but the 5E version also has an attrition system - as you build Strain, you get closer to the point where more strain will kill you, and thus unless you've got a death wish, you're going to want to slow down on your use of higher-order powers. In this game, it's been suggested that victories will allow you to reduce your Strain at the start of each fight, but if we assume the system works similarly, Strain will act as a kind of attrition on your power.
I think this is all balanced by the fact that there are factors encouraging you to push on - Victories will be a driving force that gets you to push onward, with their conversion into XP almost like a consolation prize more than an incentive to retreat (even if, in the long run, you'll want to level up).
But that got me thinking: is it even possible to do a tactical game with no sense of attrition?
One of the other TTRPGs that I've got a solid number of sessions under my belt with is Kids on Bikes. But KoB is basically not tactical at all - its mechanics are very simplistic, with ability checks to make but nothing like HP to track. The game's designed I think more to craft an improvised narrative with just a little bit of randomness built in. There's no obvious way to lose (though failing a Grit roll when an enemy attacks you can be bad - still it's entirely up to the GM and the tone of the story whether that means you get a black eye or you get disemboweled) but there's also no obvious way to win. So it's not the most useful point of comparison.
To stray into video games - I think a lot of the "build and spend" heroic resources in this system likely take some inspiration from Blizzard games like Diablo and World of Warcraft. In WoW (which readers of this blog know I have tons of experience with - this year will mark my 18th playing the game) many classes have "build and spend" mechanics, but also use cooldowns to limit powerful abilities. But that makes sense in a game that is very much a real-time system - where when you use your two-minute cooldown at 2:01 and 39 seconds PM, you'll be able to use that thing again at 2:03 and 39 seconds.
The "recover on a rest" thing in TTRPGs is a way to implement this kind of cooldown, but it lacks granularity. 4E (and this game) had "once per combat" abilities that were meant to be more freely useable but still limited, but I think D&D players didn't love the "gameiness" of it - physically how do we justify the fact that we can do this in the middle of a battle but not in some other tense, non-combat scenario?
5E lets everything work in and out of combat, though this does lead to some oddities: the Inquisitive Rogue, for example, gets a bonus on perception checks when moving at half their speed - but when is anyone tracking speed outside of combat?
But, returning to the idea of attrition:
I think it's definitely better to look at this game's approach to attrition less as a total removal of it than a de-emphasis on it. In 5E, and I think most D&D editions, there's a strong incentive to rest as much as possible. As a DM, you kind of need to create conceits to prevent players from, say, leaving the dungeon and camping after clearing every room (well, in theory - luckily I have some very RP-focused players such that I sometimes need to remind them that it's ok to take a break from the action to get a rest in).
What I think is brilliant and innovative is that this is the first system I think I've come across that actually creates an incentive for the players to keep pushing forward - where you might actually do better against the big scary boss monster if you come in bloody and bruised from the fights you've had against their minions.
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