Court of Swords Combat – Review by Kaze

By: Kaze
Originally posted: 14.12.2018

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>Combat Mechanics
Court of Swords has a unique combat system for it's duels presented here: https://pastebin.com/6eTp737y which will explain the mechanics more concisely than I ever could. Take a few minutes to read it.

Confused? That's alright, everyone else was when it was unveiled for the first time. Let's get to the review.

Well what can I say, it all works really well once you wrap your head around it and see it in action. It's a cool little system that I think would be fun to play with a UI and automation sometime. New skills Ouro has made for our opponents are always novel to see as they are all unique and work towards a greater duelist build. Then brainstorming on how to beat those builds with Sofia's skill set. The system keeps that noggin joggin and it's a lot of fun to work with. I'd like to see someday where the players create custom duelists on their own to see what they come up with (hopefully not all of them would be incredibly broken). It's extremely refreshing change of pace after the dozens of standard roll 1d100 best of three, tried and true as that system is.  It's 100% player agency in combat, and their victories and failures are their own.

The problem is, it's 100% player agency and not everyone wraps their head around it. And those people vote!

As you can probably guess from the pastebin, there is a lot of rules at play here and a lot of moving parts. It's easy to forget something small but, important like the speed of the move you are using or certain conditions in a skill. Hell you can just take bad skills for this fight and not know it til you start fighting. Couple all that with trying to remember your opponent's moves along predicting how they use them it's really easy to make mistakes. The thing about this system, is that one or two mistakes can lose you the duel. There is no safety net, no failing forward, and the outcome of the duel is teetering on a knife's edge all the time. One good queue can give you a good advantage and you can piss it all away so bad the next queue that you can't recover. Naturally everyone has their own opinion on what queue to choose. Some know what they are doing, but don't explain it well. Some don't and are very adamant about why they are right. Some just second something without thinking. Some are just stubborn to continue a certain type of play. And once they see how they failed? The salt floweth and the finger pointing begins along with all the condescending hindsight you can ask for.  Clarity is in short supply here.

This is probably my biggest gripe with the mechanics, and it's not really the mechanics fault. Just the medium it's in. The combat requires the ability to read and predict the opponent's queue, find the optimal queue for yourself, and think ahead to the next queue. This many people can't do that and agree. It's like playing chess, but you got 8 dudes behind you each grabbing different pieces with completely different strategies. Ouro has a incredible advantage as our opponents in that he is one mind who doesn't have to argue with anyone and can work towards his goal without competing with people. It also doesn't help that Sofia's skill set is centered around prediction and your opponent's skills are hidden until they are used, adding another variable and a thing to argue over. I really think that this style of combat is meant for a one person or a small (2-3) group of people that can communicate well and know what they are doing. Any more and people will just trip over each other.

Another more minor issue I have with the combat is that it can be swingy when it comes to dice rolls. I mentioned earlier that combat is usually on a knife's edge? Where one mistake can end it for you? Bad RNG can do that too.

>Well you've done it. It was hard but, you've got a shitload of dice in your Tech pool and the Strike skill is going through! Roll 2d6, 1d8, 1d10 and try to beat your opponent's d10 in Composure!

>2,3,2,1 = 8

>Uh oh, it looks like everything you worked for went down the toilet. Now your opponent is super ahead and you're back to square one.

Now this usually doesn't happen because of statistics and odds, but it has happened. It's a bit rough to have RNG hanging over you along with all other things to worry about in the combat, but I'm not sure how you'd fix it without breaking the current system. A duel has lasted 3 real life days with active sessions because of a mix of bad decisions and poor RNG nullifying progress and would have gone on longer had Ouro not pulled the plug and had the opponent concede. Bad times.

Sofia also gains skills by stealing moves off her opponents and it's very possible to choose something that looks good at a glance but, has the effectiveness of a wet fart in practice. We only get them if we win too, so it's very easy to stagnate if you're losing a lot. Which ironically makes the prediction based Sofia, incredibly predictable. There is just a lot of things that can go wrong with this combat through dumb mistakes and some of them like picking a shitty skill to add to your collection are irreversible.

This is a really fun and innovative combat system that I encourage others, especially QMs, to take a look at. Not to copy it wholesale, but to take ideas from and see how they can innovate with their own combat system. In practice though I just don't think it works with a large amount of people and it's showing by Sofia's record. Ever since Ouro turned the difficulty up from 'You can't lose this' to 'You have to think a tiny bit' the players have been on a losing streak and I don't see it stopping any time soon. People need to git gud fast or dueling is going to be one of the many things Sofia is poor at.