This Week: Remarine Combat!
How do you play a mass-battle system without managing individual units?
First things first, wanna see some spreads? The lore section of Remarine is pretty much laid out! This color scheme excites me more every time I look at it, too. I can’t wait to start the player section.
I mentioned this before, but all the art is public domain anatomical sketches from over a century ago! I just, you know, made ‘em hot pink.
The Thrill of Mass Combat…Improvised?
That’s right, it’s time to talk about what might be the biggest swing I took in Remarine: the combat system.
I had two goals:
Combat that felt tactical, with player choices mattering and consequences hurting
Combat that was easy to run (and ideally also easy to stream)
It wasn’t an easy needle to thread! But we ran our first playtest and, aside from needing to work more on particular numbers, I feel good about how it plays!
Here’s how it works:
Action Economy
Players have two actions per Wave. They can bank up to two, or they can use them on one of their two chosen moves.
The moves have different ways of killing Atrophage Drones, as well as different secondary effects. When players have a fixed number of actions, they feel more like their choices matter.
Kill Count instead of HP
I assumed that the players were more powerful than the Drones. That combined with the thrill of cutting through Angels in Blazing Hymn gave me an idea: what if we dispensed with enemy HP entirely?
Instead, player moves increase their Kill Count - in other words, the entire Wave has a shared “HP”. Only one thing for the GM to track. The players get the satisfaction of mowing them down en masse and the GM has no need to track their HP or location!
Conditions and Consequences
Of course, if that’s all there is, players would use the same strategy every round. So, Remarine has Conditions, which force players to adapt by limiting who can deal damage, and Consequences, which give the players powerful abilities at a steep cost that changes from Wave to Wave.
A wave from our Remarine test looks like this:
KCT: 12 (Kill Count Target: the players needed 12 kills to resolve this Wave)
Overrun: -1 Hope to all units for the rest of the Flood (If the players failed to meet the target, they faced Hope loss!)
Condition: Only Toxic units can advance Kill Count (Tags are granted in a couple ways, most commonly by starting abilities)
Push: 1 Integrity loss to the Pillar (If the players used a Push ability, they would damage the Pillar, the person holding the Atrophage back)
It’s so short I found myself easily able to improvise and adjust on the fly! I plan on writing tables for random generation (including sufficiently-metal descriptions) I could have run this combat with nothing prepared, and my players still had to think about their choices and work together - a perfect balance of tactical and simple, at least to my taste.
Why not check out the Remarine playtest for yourself?
And of course, for more updates on this, Blazing Hymn Lightbringer, and more, subscribe for Substack Saturday!