On Posture In Gubat Banwa
So the sixth version of Gubat Banwa's First Edition "returns" to the ideal that HP as a pacing mechanic, an Action Economy limiter, and a resource pressure. As always, in Tactical Combat games, resource management is a major aspect of the gameplay. Management of action economy, management of distance, management of other currency (such as Class-specific Resources). Most of a Tactical Combat Grid game revolves around the manipulation of these mechanics: reducing, regaining, adding, changing, force multiplication/division of these resources, and more. In Tomian Design (that is, Tom of LANCER RPG and ICON RPG), costing.
For the first 5 versions of Gubat Banwa's design, we worked with lower HP values (across the board) and with Dice Pools. The idea was that each dice in a dice pool was an attack launched, or a moment of concentration. Every die in the defense pool was a parry or evasion attempted. While the fantasy of that worked pretty great, the maths on the other hand did not. It worked almost counter-intuitively against the high-flying martial arts x deliberate tactical combat that I was trying to strike a balance for. My white elephant, my Shambhala, was to strike a good balance between that.
In 1.6, while the Dice Pool didn't entirely go away--much of the game is built around getting tactically advantageous positions so that you can get more dice and a higher chance of dealing greater damage on the target--it went for a more linearly scaling game with the result on the die reducing the target's Health.
It was a hit, mostly, among the inner circle (that is to say, my friends that I run the newer version for). There was an immediate sense of "we know how this game works" now.
It was more transparent--this information was crucial to making a tactical game work and sing. This is why in video games, almost every tactical game has the "Combat Forecast", like in Fire Emblem and Final Fantasy Tactics, that showcased the expected Hit Rate and the Damage Output.
This is absolutely integral: tactical games are decision point games. Without the proper information (doesn't need to be complete information), no decision can be done satisfyingly. This isn't to say that dice pools can't be used for a tactical game of course--I've done it. But it requires a different kind of design principle and design goal that Gubat Banwa wasn't going for. That sense of martial progression, of spiritual strength and eventual enlightenment.
During the initial playtests, we were still working with HP. Hit Pearls. The idea was that every hit "shattered" a Hit Pearl. This worked with the Dice Pools, because the fiction was that every attack could be parried with Defense Dice.
What was the problem with this? Firstly, the math of this was inherently fraught, unfortunately: on higher levels, Defense Dice were either horribly impenetrable or did absolutely nothing to defend you. It became a binary thing. That was not the goal: for the martial fantasy to come to life, much of the decisions should not binary but rather, on a gradient spectrum.
To me, the destroyer of tactical grid games is when there's a single best strategy that shatters the tension of the game. My favorite parts of Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre were early game moments where the output randomness could make every fight go completely different, even if you redid the same stage more than once.
Secondly, when the outcome of an action is that, really, nothing happened, you used an attack (even worse, the attack was buffed by yourself, an ally, and tactical modifiers) and then the target was able to parry all your hits. The fiction is exciting for a second, but then when you return to the battle grid, nothing changed. The mechanics fed into the fiction, but the fiction didn't feed into the mechanics.
With the math change, the fiction of the Hit Pearls wasn't working because HP values were higher to compensate for the changed math. 12 Hit Pearls could feasibly be visualized as Link's Hearts, for example. But at 48 HP, that didn't work anymore.
Hearkening to the Ancients
So I actually went on a trip to older versions of Gubat Banwa, and found I'd solved that particular problem. Older versions of Gubat Banwa had HP as "Mettle", their ability to stay in the fight. Turning to the game's current version, I realized the Physical Defense stat was perfect: POSTURE. The stance, the guard, the ability to keep fighting, the ability to turn mortal wounds into grazing hits, the ability to ignore the effects of bleeding wounds, of burning pyres, of seeping poison.
Every attack was inflicting damage by chipping away at the target's guard, or forcing their stance into more compromised positions so that they would be open to an actual mortally wounding strike. They were still real hits that the defender was actively still guarding against. And with every attack defended, their guard wore down.
This hit me after watching Donnie Yen's SAKRA (2023) the other day. Reaching back into the high-flying wuxia roots, Donnie Yen's character doesn't even take real hits until after he's overwhelmed because he is such a martial superior against the rest of the Beggar Clan. Because his Posture was so high.
Ten Thousand Earth Shattering Blows
It worked great. Not to mention that it's a great reference to Sekiro, another huge inspiration to the games's intended fiction, which also had a Posture break. Now Staggered for half Posture or lower made sense: your guard is brittle! You court death! Now the Wide Open affliction felt more in genre: your guard is wide open, so you're suffering more!
The Physical Defense stat was renamed into PARRY, while the Magical Defense stat was kept as RESILIENCE (itself a reference to Final Fantasy Tactics A2!) The defenses were there to keep the mechanical bite of an Attack vs Defense interaction, to provide an avenue for another mechanical design space, as well as to shoe in the fact that when an attack targets your Parry you're physically blocking while an attack against your Resilience requires your fortitude and concentration to block against: when your Posture is reduced, when you guard is worn down by these attacks, you know how you were defending.
When enemies hit 0 POS, that attack is the one that gets through their Defenses and kills them outright. When a Kadungganan falls to 0 POS they're not dead, but they suffer a WOUND, which only heals on Downtime (as opposed to POS healing on Repose, ie., short rest).
While you're Defeated, you suffer the same effects of Stun, but you can still act and do things, even make attacks at full power: you're Kadungganan after all. But every attack against you, despite your PARRY or your RESILIENCE is not met with a stance ready to block. Thus, every instance of damage you suffer, no matter how much, inflicts another Wound. When you eat 5 Wounds, you can pull on your Conviction to stay alive. Otherwise, you are tossed back into the cycle of reincarnation, or into the river to Sulad, or to Lunar Heaven, or to whatever next life your Kadungganan has chosen to ascribe to.
Statuses such as Poisoned, Bleeding, or Aflame, don't break you yet because they must eat through your bodily resistance. But they are still real: an aflame Kadungganan fights on even as flames swathe their body.
They can die later, when they feel the effects of the burn when their POS falls to 0. They can die later, when the Poison finally seeps through and enervates them and destroys their defensive capability. They can die later, when the bleeding takes its toll and they can no longer keep their stance up.
With a simple terminology change, the fiction changed entirely. Now everyone knew it was their defenses wearing down. Swords didn't cut off their fingers, flames didn't burn through their skin. They know that defenses are a holistic thing: your stamina, your constitution, your composure, your reactive ability, your dexterity, your presence of mind, your focus.
"It's not realistic!" The game is not meant to be realistic, and realism is not an inherent ontological good nor is it a goal for most TTRPGs, you will notice. Experiences, feelings. The fiction Gubat Banwa draws upon--SEAsian Folk Epics, Asian Martial Arts Cinema--is filled to the brim with the CLANG CLANG CLANG of sword-on-sword action. Often these clangs happen so quickly that you cannot process them, they are abstracted to you when it resolves in your brain--so is it abstracted by Gubat Banwa. Posture going down is the CLANG CLANG CLANG that resonates across a fight scene. It's not realistic because it's not meant to be, and even then, we must argue what your conception of reality is!
I could be argued that much of Tabletop RPGs (and, I would argue, most of games in general) is an exercise of language. Exploiting its vagaries, its ability to connect. When you go into Gubat Banwa, learning the mechanics of the game is learning a new language. And what is language but the foundation of culture?