#fowf devlog

[that-house]

Field of White Flowers Devlog #1: Enemy Minions

uh. we're pretty solidly into development so this being devlog #1 is kinda weird but I wanted to talk about a new mechanic I developed today and said "fuck it. devlog time"

first off, quick list of recent bug fixes/content patches:

nerfed Stand Behind Me, a power which allows allies to Hide behind you. Made it so that the person being Hidden behind has to act more often to shelter their allies, putting them more squarely in harm's way

added Shock, a new debuff that stacks up over time before damaging the target

replaced an unused Aggression Power, Brutal Cleave, with a new Shock-based Power, the creatively-named Shock Trooper. applies Shock to all enemies at the start of combat, maintaining Brutal Cleave's niche AoE potential but in a more interesting and synergistic way.

buffed Witch Stance to work with Pyrrhic Victory for easier conversion of debuffs into damage

changed Catharsis and Burn Twice as Bright to both provide a conditional +1 bonus to Contests with another +1 bonus locked behind a more difficult Condition (Catharsis now gives +1 if you're in a favorable matchup, and an extra +1 if your enemy is in a disfavorable matchup, while Burn Twice as Bright gives +1 if your enemy is Hexed and an additional +1 if they're Cursed)

Bathe in Gore (stacking bonus to hit whenever you hit) no longer stacks infinitely and therefore does not automatically win encounters at a certain point (while this seems incredibly obvious in retrospect it's a holdout from the earlier days of the system when it was geared towards PvP and HP numbers were lower)

nerfed Hunter Stance again (who knew that doubling damage in a low HP system would be broken). it used to work like Wrath in Slay the Spire, doubling incoming and outgoing damage. It now doubles all incoming damage, and doubles one source of outgoing damage per turn. No more Combo Finisher + Showstopper hit six times a turn combo

Now, to explain Minions, I have to first give a quick rundown on the basics of combat in Field of White Flowers:

the big thing is that players determine initiative order, in every way. players may go in any order, as many times in a row as all the players are chill with. if your DPS has a four turn combo and you don't mind sitting there for a few minutes, they can go hog wild.

on a player's turn, they pick an enemy to act against, and that enemy simultaneously attempts to act against them. Field of White Flowers aims for the sort of high power bullshit where players can fight armies, and so it's fairly easy to represent an army with a single statblock. thus, a whole army can be a single "enemy" that a player is fighting on their turn

however, I did want to add an option to spice up encounters with the addition of extra enemies. this was a problem, as by default there is nothing stopping players from just fighting the weaker enemy first, scaling some of their abilities in a lower-risk environment, and only targeting the boss when they had a big ability ready

...okay i have to introduce one more concept to fully explain minions. i lied when i said that players always determine who acts in combat and when. there is a mechanic called the Initiative, that certain actions pass to the GM, who can spend it on fucking with the players and also allows the boss to target a specific player. Initiative is passed by interacting with some key element of the environment (such as attempting to shatter a crystal maintaining the boss' shield), by bringing downed players back into the fight, and by failing to hit a Minion.

Minions provide the boss with some bonus while alive: maybe a bonus to hit, or a source of healing, protection, debuffs, or damage. They aren't super difficult to kill, often only requiring a turn or two to bring down, but if you swing at them and miss, the boss gets Initiative. Essentially, while you're swinging at the weak enemy in the fight, there's always a chance that the boss gets to take a super turn and kick your shit in. You don't have to kill the Minion (or Minions, if your GM is a freak) but doing so will make the fight far, far easier if it works.

Some fun example uses of Minions:

Use a Minion to represent a magical bomb that has to be destroyed before turn 7 or it explodes

For a huge boss, represent its limbs with different Minions

A brutal up close boss and a Minion sniper who uses Initiative (generated either from failures to kill the sniper or from helping allies downed by the boss) to do a ton of damage

A team composed of a leader and a few Minions who support the leader in different ways, mirroring some of the roles of the player characters

A loyal bodyguard Minion who outright prevents players from damaging the boss (though they may still want to attack the boss to apply debuffs)

As a little closing remark, there are a few other mechanics in the game for adding extra combatants to fights without adding a whole extra combatant:

Supporting Cast, a Power that players also have access to, which gives you a posse of mercenaries, zombies, summoned fiends, or what have you, which can be spent for short term gain at the cost of getting weaker when you run out. In a similar vein is Shadow Clone, which creates clones throughout a fight that you can spend to avoid hits and hit more often

We Are Legion: for all your “this is a whole army” needs: much higher stats that lower over the course of a fight as the players scythe through hundreds of troops

Power Couple: empowers two of the enemy’s combat actions, one of which is disabled when the enemy falls to half HP as the players kill one of the matched set. the players get to choose which enemy they kill and thus which action they disable

And of course, as with all things Field of White Flowers, you can flavor things however you like. You don’t need these effects to make an enemy statblock that represents multiple people, I just aim to streamline the process.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask! I mostly just made this post because I have to talk about FoWF or I’ll die, so go ahead and give me an excuse to talk about it more!