As the principal game designer on Kobold Tactics I had an interesting task: how do you create a tabletop game for people who may never have played a tabletop game?
First, we need to set the stage. In June of 2022 SDC began their annual Progressive Game Jam, and I began my annual foray into the world of video game development. You see, traditionally I’ve been a tabletop RPG game designer. While I’ve tried to participate in various video game projects in the past, none have been even remotely successful. It’s all been for various reasons – joining a team that’s been working together for a while and struggling to find a place, different project visions, a mass disease outbreak that kept everyone in their homes for two years. Just the typical stuff you encounter in a game jam.
Enter: Kobold Tactics. Pitched as a reverse tabletop game where you play as a group of monsters terrorizing a village (and almost as important from my perspective: pitched by an artist) it naturally drew my attention immediately. At the time I was focused on my two primary projects – Mythos; a Lovecraftian-inspired trading card game, and COMIC; a tabletop roleplaying system for superheroes. But I thought I could develop a tabletop-esque tactics system that would be compact enough to be fully developed within the 3 month timeframe that we had for the Progressive Game Jam.
The first step was to come up with a cast of characters. The concept for Kobold Tactics was inspired by The Game That Shall Not Be Named. So it was important to keep a lot of those elements in place. Races needed to be recognizable on the same level as Elves and Dwarves. They needed to make sense within the game world. They would need attribute bonuses, and penalties. And each race would need some unique trait that set it apart from the every other race:
Of course, in a game where the monsters are supposed to take center stage, we needed more to work with. How can you have an army of monsters, when the biggest guy in your party is an ogre? Everyone loves Shrek and all, but we needed something that would really pop. So, with a bit of brainstorming with the team we came up with the “big” monsters:
The idea behind these guys was that they were bigger, more powerful, and just straight up better than the other monsters on the list. Interestingly, the Mimic out of all the creatures, was in from day 1 – the other monsters all had a bit of debate. With that, the cast of characters was set, and all that was left was to build a backbone from the game. For that I thought I would do something unique. Drawing from the TTRPG Deathwatch, I came up with the idea for a requisition system. In Deathwatch, each player gets a unique character, and when they’re assigned to a mission, they receive a certain number of “requisition points.” These requisition points can be spent to borrow non-standard equipment – anything that isn’t power armor or a bolter, essentially.
Particularly, what I liked about the requisition system was that it would allow for easy modification of the difficulty of an encounter, without completely rebuilding the encounter. Was a fight too hard? Increase the requisition. Too easy? Give the player less requisition to work with. It also allowed me to create an easy way to keep the player in check, so to speak. At the beginning of each fight, all the player would get to take with them was the experience they earned over the previous fights – they would need to gear up from zero.
This all made sense at the time because we still had a very, very, limited scope in terms of story – it basically didn’t exist. Red wasn’t really a thing yet, neither were any of the rest of the cast in the cave. The team in the cave really came together as a result of the games design, rather than having the design cater to the story as is so often the case – especially in fantasy settings. When we decided to have random units you could recruit, we needed a character you could recruit them from: enter Commander Bubbles. We knew players would want to keep using favorite units over and over, so we would need somewhere to store experienced units. And as more features were added to the game, new characters were introduced in the cave to cater to those needs.
With every rule we added, though, the thought process was never far from “easy on the surface, but lots of depth.” The goal for Kobold Tactics was to create a game that anyone who can read can pick up and enjoy, but still had enough depth to keep people coming back time and again for months. The Strike/Dodge system is a great example of that:
An attack roll is resolved as a simple d10 (10-sided dice, for anyone not-in-the-know) vs a static number – 5 for team kobold, 6 for the townsfolk, and 8 for the heroes. While on the surface this may look questionable, the reality is that most fights will only have 1 or 2 heroes. You can equate the heroes to the boss in the fight; while the townsfolk serve the role of mooks, able to be killed in 1 or 2 hits usually.
Ultimately this led to a system that is pretty easy to hop into. I was able to put that to the test last night when the lead programmer @jonathan had the opportunity to playtest the system for the first time. For any TTRPG system, setup takes a while, and even more so when you have to write up stats for 5, 10, or 15 units at a time. After the setup phase though, we were able to hop into combat rather quickly.
Jonathan isn’t a typical TTRPG gamer. While he may have dabbled a bit, he hasn’t put any significant amount of time into those types of games. Yet, within 5 minutes of combat starting he had a clear understanding of the way that combat would flow and needed no reminders of what to do next. Short on time he declared victory after defeating a single villager, but not without some close calls of his own.
If you would like to try out Kobold Tactics on a tabletop for yourself, you can find the complete list of rules, and first two scenarios here (Excel) or here (PDF) – note that on the Excel version you can hit F9 to quickly generate new characters (refresh the page if you open it in Google docs).