Stamina is a resource I bolted onto both the RUNE engine and the NULL/CIPHER healthless idea for Valiant Horizon Tactics. It’s a very major change to how a RUNE-like does things.

Notably it’s also not really a Valiant Horizon idea, it’s kind of something that came off of neither game. So what’s up with that? One prior that bears notice is that Stamina was in the earliest Total//Effect prototype version I made: it was going to be like 13th Age recoveries/4E healing surges but also usable for restoring used abilities to form a kind of generic “dungeon attrition” resource. It also made it into VH briefly but I cut it early (like, a month into active development/testing) because it was kind of useless there, as it was only for recovering (which people don’t do enough for it to be worth tracking). So it’s been on my mind for awhile in relation to Valiant Horizon. (It might return in a future Total//Effect game. Who knows, stay tuned.)¹

Now, what do I want it to do here? I want to add choice. RUNE has this thing where once you’ve got your equipment set, you pretty much know what you want to be doing every round and there’s not much in the way of options beyond placing dice depending on what they provide (or don’t provide - you can just get skunked repeatedly on rolls). I love the dynamics of “some rounds I have more options than others” but not “I don’t really have a choice here other than to stall and wait until the dice stop fucking me over”. Overall I want to give people a little more control over things - I want them to have the ability to mitigate bad situations AND tools to capitalize on good ones. I want situations that don’t just boil down to the loathed D&D-story trope of “I rolled a 1 so everything went to shit” or “I rolled a 20 so I got everything I wanted”, basically. You can see this idea coming in a lot of RUNE content through consumables or runes with 1/battle effects too. So instead of that, I just built it into the game inherently.

Ways to spend Stamina in combat include:

• Each Soul Crystal has 1-3 Stamina-spend abilities. No matter who or what you are, you have at least one! These are usually in the mold of:
  • When you (Block, Move, Strike, Invoke), spend 1 Stamina to do an extra (Block, Move, Strike, Invoke).
  • Spend 1 Stamina at the start of the round to gain some beneficial effect.
  • Spend 2 Stamina at the start of the round to gain some extremely beneficial effect.
• Some Armaments and Accessories have Stamina-spend abilities similar to the above.
• Using Powers. You have to prepare them during rest by reserving max Stamina (or depending on your Soul Crystal, you might get 1-2 “free” Powers: classes with fewer stamina-spend abilities - and therefore fewer “free” Strikes, see devlog #1 - gain proportionally more of these) and using the Invoke action. When you Invoke, you can use any Power you have prepared by spending its cost in Stamina, so if you have 2+ prepared you’ve got a fair amount of choice.

Characters have 8 max Stamina (and maybe a little less with more Powers prepared as described above, call it like 6-8²]). Attrition brings Stamina down over time (we’ll get to long-term attrition between fights in the next devlog probably, put a pin in that) so in a lot of fights they’ll practically have more like 4-6. On average this usually means they can use like 1, maybe 2 per round comfortably in a fight. When they run out, they’ll have to rely much more heavily on good rolls and playing defensively, so it behooves them to not just try to blow all of it at the start so much as think about when it can be used best.

What this also does is help to differentiate characters. The RUNE approach of “your character is basically just your equipment” is perfectly reasonable for a lot of games but that felt weird for this more fantasy-ish one: one thing I wanted to do from the outset here was make it so two characters with pretty similar equipment would play differently. One way to do that is to provide a bunch of passive abilities, but it’s my constant assertion that nothing slows a game down quite like players tracking a bunch of passive abilities.

Instead I provided those stamina-actives above. This provides a way to steer classes towards different playstyles based on their actions rather than generic traits: the Knight wants to be up close and personal because they have abilities that work at that range, the Bard wants to be very mobile and create its own luck because it has abilities that let it do that, and the Blazemagus wants to be Invoking damaging Powers a lot because its one stamina-ability keys off of that. This could have been done via more Valiant Horizon-esque/RUNE-esque One Use Encounter Power style tracking too, but this way, you only have to track one resource - this was done for both attrition reasons and for flexibility reasons. You’re going to get a lot more screwed by bad rolls here than in VH, so adding in some flexibility is good; correspondingly, if we start chipping away at your maximum meter that powers everything, it affects everything you do, and both of those are good outcomes as far as I’m concerned. (Each class also has a you-rolled-a-1 ability, and I could have done more of those, but I’d prefer to keep roll effects mostly in the realm of armaments/accessories.)

Next devlog is probably when we talk about the general flow of exploration and attrition unless I think of something else worth talking about first.

1. I also just like resource-based approaches to things in a lot of cases!³ APOCALYPSE FRAME has two of ‘em: Tension which is a push and pull of action economy and Fuel which lets you activate powers outside that action economy. (VH Tactics had two in the first version I made, for that matter - Stamina and Focus, with the first acting like current Stamina and the second restoring only on rest - but I decided it didn’t feel right and collapsed it down to one resource. ANOINTED still has this basic split but that game’s currently kind of a mess and will probably return in an extremely different version whenever I get back to it.)

2. Any numbers here - and especially things like Stamina and power prep costs, which are in flux and I have several minds about - are subject to change as I mess around in the game more and see what the more general shape of things is. But that’s the general idea.

3. I have complicated (mostly negative) thoughts about the value of spending-health-as-do-stuff-resource but that’s a post for another time.