Manifest: LP and Manifesting

One of the big questions raised by this restructuring is: how to handle LP?

Hit points drastically effect how a game plays: how abundant they are, how easy they are to lose or regain, and any other uses for them all have a significant impact on an RPG. Are Manifestations fragile or robust? How many turns, on average, will it take for a Manifestation to kill another Manifestation of the same Tier? A higher Tier? Lower?

Can LP be used for other purposes? Are some special abilities fueled by LP? Can any Manifestation spend LP to boost their POWER or CONTROL, or only ones with a specific passive? Can Manifestations heal their own LP? Other’s LP? Is it only the Agent’s job?

I can answer that last one: for Manifest v0.2, I want to keep healing as an exclusive Agent ability. I also want Manifestations to be fragiler than not, thereby giving weight to the decision of healing a Manifestation vs re-summoning it later. I also don’t want the game to drag, and fragile units can help speed things up. None of that gives solid numbers, though — a 100 HP wizard is pretty fragile if a dagger does 500 damage on average — so how do I decide how much LP to give Manifestations?

Keeping it simple is obviously better for cognitive load. In the old systems, LP was found by multiplying Bond times Tier. In the new system; Bond has been removed, stats range from 2 to 5, and Tier ranges from 1 to 5. This means if we multiplied tier and emotional stat for LP, the weakest Manifestation would be a Tier 1 with their stat at 2, which gives them 2 LP. The beefiest monster would be a Tier 5 with the highest stat of 5, or 25 LP.

If you chart out the spread of possible LPs, there isn’t much overlap, which could make play interesting, but there is quite a spread. 2 to 25 means either easily killed Manifestations until they reach a higher Tier, or ridiculously over-resilient high-Tiers.

I’ve also said I want Manifestations to be more fragile than not, so let’s start simple and quick: LP = 2*Tier. That means a Tier 1 has 2 LP, a Tier 5 has 10. A powerful Push 5 could take out a Tier 5 if they’re Terrified, while it could take an investment of 4 dice to even have the chance of killing a Tier 2 in one blow.

I think this is a good place to start. It means most Manifestations can be killed by two actions, or one if they’re unlucky. This fragility will keep the gameplay quick…but now we have to consider a Manifestation’s death.

What happens when Manifestations “die?” If one de-manifests, is that it for the fight? Why can’t I summon them back? They come from my emotions, right? I don’t stop feeling because a Manifestation gets punched really hard, right?

What if we added an Agent Action that summons Manifestations? This means weak Manifestations that get one-shotted can be brought back into the fray, a strategy of swarming low-LP chaff is viable, and sacrificial strategies are more appealing.

So how do Manifestations manifest?

Let’s start with some givens: stronger Manifestations must be harder to summon than weaker ones, and more Manifestations must be harder to summon than fewer. Also, if you are angry it should be easier to summon Angry type Manifestations. This suggests penalties based on both the number of already manifest Manifestations and the Tier of the Manifestation being summoned, and bonuses based on your Stats.

But Manifesting takes time, too. There should be a cost of some kind, so sitting back and spamming no-cost chaff isn’t a viable strategy. Agents should care about their Manifestations, at least a little bit, and popping out a Tier 5 shouldn’t be as quick and easy as throwing out a Tier 1.

So: Manifestations take time — time that an Agent could spend doing other useful actions — possibly provide a penalty to other actions, and get progressively harder as more Manifestations fill the field.

We have a lot of variables here, and they all relate to each other in some fashion as-yet devised. Let’s sort through them, shall we?

First off, no one should ever fail to summon a Manifestation. This means we can start at the “worst possible scenario” and work backwards: given the available variables, the worst possible situation is a Manifestation taking a long time to summon. We know that high-Tier Manifestations are harder to summon, so let’s just equate the two. Manifesting takes the same number of turns as their Tier. Easy.

But we need to scale and adjust based on Bond, stats, and number of already present Manifestations, so what if we did some addition and subtraction? Time = Tier + Number of Manifestations – Stat, minimum of 1 turn. Again, clean and easy.

But also poorly scaled. Check out this chart:

| Manifesting Tier || Number of Manifestations || Stat || Time | |:—————-:|:————————:|:—-:|:—-:| | 5 || 0 || 3 || 2 | | 5 || 1 || 3 || 3 | | 5 || 2 || 3 || 4 | | 5 || 3 || 3 || 5 |

Taking two turns to manifest a Tier 5 makes sense, but then each subsequent Manifestation only takes one more turn. And what about smaller Tiered Manifestations?

| Manifesting Tier || Number of Manifestations || Stat || Time | |:—————-:|:————————:|:—-:|:—-:| | 2 || 0 || 3 || -1 | | 2 || 1 || 3 || 0 | | 2 || 2 || 3 || 1 | | 2 || 3 || 3 || 2 |

Assuming an emotional stat of 3 is “average,” an agent won’t have to wait for a Tier 2 Manifestation until it’s their third. If time is to be a factor, it should be a relatively consistent factor.

Nothing else for it, we gotta bring in the dice. What if a higher Tier made a die roll harder?

Your first Manifestation should probably be reliable. Sure, a Tier 5 may take time and energy, but I don’t want Agents to get torn apart by a gang of Tier 1s before they even get the chance to fight. Should the first Manifestation be a freebie? But then why would you ever bother bringing a Tier 1 as your starter?

How about this: Manifesting requires rolling a number of dice equal to your emotional stat, and you count up all the dice that show equal-or-greater than the Manifestation’s Tier. Place those dice on the Manifestation, and once you have a number equal to the Tier plus the number of Manifestations, it manifests next turn.

This means a Tier 5 Manifestation will require you to roll a total of five dice with a 5 or 6. Once you’ve rolled at least five — maybe more, depending on the number of Manifestations you’ve already summoned — you have your unit. What this means for Tier 1 Manifestations is you never have to roll the die, and they take no time to summon until you’ve Manifested an equal number to their type stat. Tier 2 Manifestations require you to roll two dice and have neither be a 1, which isn’t too rare, and would only cause a significant problem if you had a emotional stat of 1. Tier 3s start to get closer to two-turn summons, requiring 3 dice to be 3s or better. Tier 4s are probably closest to 2- or 3-turn summons, needing four 4s or better, and Tier 5s may take quite a bit more time.

The downside is this encourages you to save your high-emotional-stat Manifestations for later. Not very ludo-narratively satisfying: if you’ve got Anger 5, you should be focusing on manifesting Anger. It’s an unavoidable issue; as more Manifestations make it harder to manifest, there is incentive to summon easier Manifestations later. Either way, it’s something I’ll need to keep in mind for future playtests.

Another quicker possibility: Manifesting a Manifestation is quick and easy, only requiring a roll if Tier + Number of Manifestations is greater than the Agent’s emotional stat. If a roll is required, roll Tier d6s and count how many show higher than the stat: that’s how many turns it takes to summon the Manifestation. I should keep this one in mind too…

In the meanwhile, let’s settle on this:

A Manifestation takes a number of turns to manifest equal to its Tier + the number of allied Manifestations currently on the board. While this is happening, an Agent cannot take any other actions, though they can move. When taking a Manifest action, an Agent may also roll a number of uninvested dice equal to the emotional stat of the summoning Manifestation, and reduce manifesting time equal to the number of dice that display equal-to-or-greater-than the Manifestation’s Tier.

So far so good! This makes summoning Manifestations a strategic choice. You can invest dice in reduced summoning time, but that’s more of a gamble the stronger the Manifestation is. This also means that Manifestations can/should be more fragile, as summoning weak Tier 1s is no great penalty, while the longer Tier 5s become valuable, to be used sparingly and/or cleverly.

But so far, all this does so far is make it harder to manifest Tier 5s. Why would you ever have Tier 5s, then? What does Tier even mean anymore? Next time, I’d like to break Tier down and see what we can salvage.