Design Thoughts: Simplifying Foes

An exposition about the reason and the ways to get rid of the health-to-progress track conversion and the foe sheet.

THE CURRENT ISSUE WITH COMBAT: END THE FIGHT

In vanilla Ironsworn, the total health of foes is as per their rank:

• Troublesome: 3,5 health
• Dangerous. 5 health
• Formidable: 10 health
• Extreme: 20 health
• Epic: 40 health

However, Ironcrunch makes use of OSR sources for its bestiary, and this means a wider range of health values. This isn't a problem in itself, but the Ironsworn system makes use of progress moves for larger conflict resolution, and combat is one of them.

The End the Fight move allows the player to finish a battle encounter any time whenever they have the initiative and enough progress as they consider opportune. During playtesting for Ironcrunch, however, this move has been a bit sloppy to execute.

Currently, in order to perform the move, you must reduce your foe's health to below 10, and since you do it once per foe, it would take a long to be able to End the Fight if you're facing 3 foes of 20+ health, for instance. By not being able to End the Fight with a great amount of damage inflicted to a foe, the current mechanic takes away the freedom and flexibility that defines the Ironsworn system.

ANOTHER ISSUE WITH COMBAT: THE FOE SHEET

Although it seemed like a good idea, the foe sheet has been an irksome element at the table: too much space to track the health of a single foe. So fixing the foes' health problem would also solve the workability to track them.

To solve this, I envisioned: 1) small index cards with a progress track (in which the player would also track morale if wanted), or 2) a single paper with progress tracks, being on a notebook or sheet. But then, how to represent the variety of health values if the progress track is always 10 boxes?

THE SOLUTION

I've been considering many options. Among those: 1) making a roll +stat to End the Fight once a certain amount of harm has been inflicted, and 2) making each box of the progress track a milestone of the harm inflicted, presented in percentages; but the first would imply to leave the progress unresolved while the second would make the progress too cumbersome to calculate.

So to better represent the foes' health, I came up with the idea of varying the number of progress boxes to fill per foe, which would imply using different dice as challenge dice to make the End the Fight progress move. Therefore, a progress track of 4 boxes will require to roll 2d4; a progress track of 6 boxes, to roll 2d6; and so on.

THE FIRST DRAFT

To fill these boxes, at first, I thought of using the standard array of ranks: troublesome, dangerous, formidable, extreme, and epic; and within those ranks, subcategorize them by the amount of boxes in their progress tracks.

The issue with this arrangement is that during combat, marking the harm/progress resulted in a sloppy combat flow. Inflicting 1d6+1 harm, for instance, required to spend too much time marking progress if the foe was troublesome, dangerous, or extreme; this was because the natural conversion to make for the rank (harm to the number of ticks of boxes to fill) makes this process an intuitive and lengthy experience, which damages the combat flow. This is not a problem for vanilla Ironsworn, because in the unaltered Ironsworn System you don't have so much harm to inflict, since it is usually up to 3 harm. But, in Ironcruch, the granularity of the values makes the combat less abstract and thus, less determined by a few rolls.

THE SECOND DRAFT

In order to fix the fiddling, the foes would require to be only formidable or epic, so marking progress would be much more intuitive: 1 trick or 1 box. The arrangement would be the following:

Each creature that will be converted from OSR sources will fall into one of these ranks, according to their Hit Dice (HD).

Why not use this system with vows, journeys, and other progress tracks? Because those other game elements don't require as much granularity as the one required to cover a vast variety of monsters. Let's keep in mind that this arrangement is mainly to support a wider variety of foes' health and to get rid of the health to progress conversion. Vows, journeys, bonds, and delving work perfectly fine with progress tracks of 10 boxes, as those aspects of the game are intrinsically abstract not only by design but also by the concept.

WHAT THIS MEANS

• Using the latter arrange of foe ranks would make the conversion from OSR monsters much simpler, as it would only require taking into account the HD value to fit the monster into one of these molds.
• The former doesn't mean I won't convert monsters from OSR and leave the work out to the player. That Appendix: Bestiary is coming, and I'm expecting it to take 50% of the rulebook.
• Creature cards are still appealing to me, but tarot size won't be possible, as it will take a slew of pages and it would be awkward at the table once printed. So far, the plan is to use the method employed for the ancestry cards: make them standard card size with only the gameplay-related information in them; the fluff and other values will be left to the Appendix: Bestiary entries.
• The foe sheet won't longer be necessary as it will be replaced with small index cards or a single paper to track foe's health morale.
• This simplification of the foes' health will come for the next update, so keep tuned in.

Thank you all for your great support! Please let me know if you have any kind of feedback. Take care and drink hot brews.