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| Art @BHVR Interactive |
One interesting thing about playing a game that's been around for such a long time, with so much exploration of its very rudimentary game mechanics, with such a large community and critical culture around its basal systems, is that you develop this sort of inbred and highly referential style of game design; where everything from character traits and personalities to tropes to supernatural powers are represented through a very strict set of game design principles and mechanics. In a sense, it's exactly the fucking same as D&D, but that's a topic for a whole different Vaguepost.
Sidenote: If you didn't get my rambling word salad above, what I mean is the game really hasn't changed in like 8 years despite having ten times the characters, perks, systems, etc. An example is the perk Self Preservation ; how do you represent a self-interested character who is willing to sacrifice others to get what they want or protect themselves? In some games this could be literally making them take a hit for you; but in DBD that would be absolute cancer. Instead? It hides your scratch marks, blood pools, and sounds of pain (ways you can be tracked) when one of your teammates takes a hit within a certain range (enforcing the flavor), meaning they are much more likely to continue to get attacked then you (appropriate benefit). It's thematically appropriate, but essentially a shrinking of all possible design space (or "story" if it was literature) to accommodate for the actual game being played.
Despite this grand diversity and development of mechanics; Dead by Daylight's core gameplay of a chase is extremely simple, and has essentially not changed in the majority of the game's lifespan. Basically; survivors who are healthy or at the start of the match make way less noise, and can be hit once to become injured. Once injured, they leave pools of blood and make more noise, and if hit again they will be downed and put into the dying state. While following the survivor, the Killer gains bloodlust that slowly makes them move faster. Survivors can avoid killers by using very obstacles in the map, like windows they jump through faster then Killers or dropping pallets that slow the Killers down as they break them. Once in the dying state, the Killer can hook the survivor which gets them closer to being sacrificed (killed), or they may be able to kill them themselves if a specific condition is met; but for the individual chase it is over. Obviously the fact that only one role can harm or kill the other, and the fact that role gains special powers and abilities to end the chase faster, means it is very asymmetrical and eventually all but the absolute best or luckiest survivors will go down. This seems unfair, but remember the game is asymmetrical and while one survivor is being chased, the others remaining can rescue one another, heal up, travel & explore the map, make progress on escaping, and so on.
What makes this interesting (and in my opinion crucial to the game's relevance and success in the genre since all other competitors have failed for one reason or another) is how binary and limiting this game design scheme seems at its surface. There isn't even a health bar or hit points like in other games. Hit once for injured, again for downed. This is a far cry from most multiplayer games; which tend to measure time to kill much faster and having more modifiers for weapon types, damage, abilities, etc. Fighting games grant a bar for damage that allows for small mistakes to build up via chip damage or comboing, Smash Bros has a percentage that increases knockback and vulnerability for a powerful finisher, PVP in an MMO would have a long time to kill based on various abilities, status effects, and split being single target unavoidable moves and area of effect damage that can be dodged, and so on.
Even games with very lethal and realistic damage systems, like a Call of Duty or Counterstrike with rapid firing modern weapons, still grant the players hit points to allow them to take a certain amount of damage before dying. Effectively these games could be simplified to make it so simply getting shot with a bullet eliminates you, but slight differences in damage per time or locational damage to incentivize good aim and so forth creates its own environment for game design that's distinct.
check my fit
The (Other) Hit-Point Problem
One of the most common ways to create gameplay depth and player choice would be doing something that modifies your numerical abilities to a game. Something like attack and defense modifiers, or elemental resistances, and so on. This allows players to being to create playstyles or make decisions that increase the longevity and engagement of the game or system they are playing.
So imagine that Dead by Daylight was designed with Hit-Points in mind. The developers decide that the average Killer should knock survivors down in two hits, so they give survivors 100 Hit-Points, and have a Basic Attack do 50 damage. Simple. But now we have a problem. If the Killer wants to express themselves by increasing their damage, by perhaps finding a new piece of gear or equipping a perk or whatever, this has no actual effect on the gameplay, as it would still take two hits to down a survivor. Unless you manage to stack these upgrades until you literally got to double damage, in which case, the ability to single-hit a survivor would be such a significant change that the entire game would have to be built around this possibility. This also has a problem with stacking incomparable mechanics. 10% increased damage and 10% increased attack speed could be a comparable value in some games, but here it would be a stupid choice.
However, further problems arise in the fact that the reverse of this scenario is not true. If Survivors could say, equip armor that reduced damage slightly found around the map or spend just a few seconds healing themselves a little bit, even just by 1% would effectively mean you could get three health states instead of two, which is an incredibly powerful ability that is currently reserved in the game for very special circumstances. This leads to an inherent problem with game designing and balance; you can't have an equal option of 10% damage for Killer and 10% damage-reduction for Survivor because they wouldn't actually balance themselves out. If both players had it it would, but the core gameplay of DBD is very binary in this regard. This is why an MMO or tabletop game can have dumb shit like "+5% increased chance to hit" and it's meaningful, but in an action adventure or shooter game it really wouldn't make enough of a difference to be noticeable or important.
Of course, this is all predicated on the notion that DBD would ever have a Hit-Point system and no other changes where made along the way; which is clearly not the case. Maybe if the more damaged survivors got the slower they ran, or the more blood they left behind making them easier to track, or the weaker they are struggling while being carried the lower their Hit-Points went into the negatives when struck down, and so on could all increase the design-space of the concept. This isn't really a critique of a hypothetical system, it's to illustrate a concept behind game design and the natural consequences behind these systems that lead to specific design outcomes.
Dead by Daylight's Game Design is Pretty Good Actually
Despite this seeming limitation, Dead by Daylight has introduced a lot of mechanics that meaningfully play around this strict adherence to the chases. A few perks do obvious things, like granting speed boosts or the occasional Exposed status effect, letting survivors get knocked down in one hit; but this is always temporary or predicated on some kind of special perk or activation requirement to grant some kind of counterplay. However, what is more interesting is how many perks and powers play around this two-hits-to-down concept in meaningful ways.
The most obvious? In a 3d video game with a complex environment, the ability to damage survivors at range with a variety of different types of weapons or power is an obvious one. Because every Killer can attack up close with a basic attack, which are essentially unlimited and much harder to avoid by survivors most of the time; most powers result in different methods of ranged or area of effect attacks. Dead by Daylight has experimented with a lot of these, and almost all of them are just different enough to make them unique. You have a basic projectile that just does damage with limited ammo (Huntress), a faster projectile that pulls survivors close for an attack (Deathslinger), projectiles with a wind up and warning that hit through walls (Pyramid Head), a projectile that does no damage on its own but significantly slows survivors or gets you closer to them so they can be hit easier (Pinhead, Singularity, the new Houndmaster, etc.) All of these attacks essentially still require you to hit the survivor twice, but have a method to make it a little easier and faster and a way to prevent survivors from "looping" the Killer (running around obstacles in circles to make it take longer to down them).
While if every Killer was rigorously designed to require two hits to down a Survivor regardless of power or what they did, the design space is expanded to allow for more concepts. For instance; there are a few killers who can knock down survivors in one hit. They either have a chainsaw that needs to be revved up and aimed (and can be dodged), or the Killer requires a certain amount of set up, like stalking survivors from afar without chasing them or building up some kind of super meter. This concept creates a juicy design space where you are essentially off loading the time cost of an average chase with a much shorter chase IF You can land your skillshot or catch the survivor making a serious mistake. This concept also extends the opposite way; some Killers actually need three hits to down survivors with their powers, which would make them complete garbage in a vacuum, but the method or ability that allows them to do this carries with it another side effect, or depletes a valuable survivor resource. For example, instead of a straight shot projectile that deals a health state, the Unknown uses a grenade-launcher-spit-thing that causes survivors to become weakened. This status effect has no real effect on the survivors other then making them a little easier to see; but if they hit a weakened survivor with their explosion it will deal damage. So while it takes three hits to down survivors with this creature's power, the individual hits are easier to land, can hit multiple survivors at once, can shoot over walls or hit through thin obstacles, doesn't need to be reloaded at a locker and has a shorter cooldown, and so on.
While you can't make an attack do more damage or something, you can add other benefits. Most of the time when Killers get some kind of generic boost, it's usually increased lunge distance, which means they can hit around certain tiles or loops easier. Your cooldown after a successful attack can be reduced by several methods, and your attacks could inflict various status effects. The survivor side is the same; you can't easily make the survivors more stealthy beyond doing weird stuff like making them transparent or shrinking their model smaller, you can reduce their grunts of pain or scratch marks- which are methods of tracking. You could just increase survivor speed, but similar to the two-hit system having too many speed boosts or bonuses would ruin the predictability and importance of certain systems like looping and time-to-kill that's extremely important for this game. Some of the most broken times of this game were when survivors could stack various bonuses and buffs to become nearly uncatchable, and in a game where one killer has to chase down four survivors this quickly becomes a big problem, which is why such important things need to be carefully considered. The developers have been less and less willing to experiment with such things, granting smaller benefits like bonuses to non-objective actions like opening chests, totems, healing, and so forth instead of touching the much more central and precarious mechanics of the game. As a side note: I think tabletop games suffer from this issue too, not just in "D&Disms", but in the general sacred cows of the genre, like having set characters or a DM, mechanics based on pass-fail metrics, and so on.
Of course even with these tricks, eventually you begin to see overlaps and repeats. Killers are less individually unique in their abilities and powers and moreso the flavor and combination of abilities they have. After all, there is only so much you can do in a 3d environment built from the ground up to be static and with a very specific gameplay loop. But what can we learn from this?
Mechanical Breakpoints
Different games have different mechanical points or levers that cannot be adjusted or included in part of the game's milieu without it totally breaking the game. These are "breakpoints". The term is also interchangeable to a system or mechanic that meaningfully changes when enough pressure is applied to it; such as an RPG where you boost your damage to the point you can defeat an enemy in two hits instead of three. This became a bit messy halfway through writing it as trying to bridge these two concepts, but I think it'll work.
So what is a big mechanical breakpoint in a tabletop game? The examples given above do start it out. For example, an enemy monster with 7 Hit-Points automatically requires two 1d6 weapon hits to defeat regardless of how good your roll is. This could be considered a breakpoint, but given the number of damage, hit, morale rules, and so on I don't actually consider this the best example. Another could be spells; a spell effect as written either takes effect, or it doesn't, as per magic resistance rules. This one is tough because depending on the spell or magic effect, there is no easy way to "tone down" its effects to represent it being partially resisted or avoided and so on, and since published games tend to have one single rule/effect (since that's what the medium is primarily, the written word), it makes sense that the mechanics would be enforced to support what the text says since anything else requires too much arbitration on the part of the DM to do regularly.
But after much deliberation; do you know what the biggest mechanical breakpoint of a tabletop game actually is? It's actions, or turns. The action economy. This sounds a lot more obvious now that I'm typing it up, but being able to do more things in a round is a huge deal. If tabletop games were typically played between parties of 10 or more, like the oldest of oldschool gamers, then this would be less significant, but nowadays? It's a big deal. The typical part of 4-6 grant a huge importance to each turn. This is so important that even boss monsters, who are often outnumber by typical adventuring parties, are given special lair or legendary actions to try and even the playing field; even though the game designers can buff the stats of these monsters as much as they want. While this is a simplification, I think this is telling to the importance of turns.
The closest tabletop equivalent in video game format is usually the CRPG or, more accurately in my opinion, the humble JRPG. You can see this effect in action, as typically the player gets their biggest power spike when they get multiple party members. Even if the new party members are "bad", simply being there to hold aggro, use items, or allowing the party to retreat even after the "main" party members died is a huge advantage to avoiding a game over. In essence, it means that number of useful party actions is the biggest mechanical indicator of strength and balancing, as opposed to things like hit points or even chance of success. This is why tabletop is rife with +1 to Hit modifiers or health or whatnot are common, but there's basically never a "if you have enough Dexterity you get to make two actions a turn" sort of thing. It would be far and away better then any other choice.
So the question is; what do we do with this information? I think there are two ways to embrace this. Firstly, designing around this limitation. This is one of the reasons I never give players bonus attacks, even for fighters, except in very specific circumstances (you want to hit multiple enemies at once? there are rules for that already) I quite like the "one turn = one action" dichotomy. I think doing things like artificially shrinking the size of enemy forces and patrols to be closer to the party in size, or doing things like lumping multiple enemies together into a single mass (horde rules) is less disruptive then forcing party members to actually feel the sting of every single enemy attacking them while outnumbered. While this does mean your actions will be very specialized and specific, I think with the right mindset and design of the game it can be just as dramatic and fun. Like if you can only choose to attack, heal, or cast a spell; designing the game to make all of those equally big and impactful could be really fun. Just linear advancement of these abilities may seem boring, but another way to to design around this limitation is to rely on setups, bonuses, or other hand-in-hand modifiers.
In the above video game examples; a perk to break a pallet in DBD 10% faster is a nice thing to have. But that's because video games are real time, and saving a few portions of a second is noticeable and useful, but not gamebreaking on its own. Meanwhile, being able to do things faster in tabletop means either going first (it's an on or off, not granular) or making more actions overall (gamebreaking), so instead, we reverse this dichotomy. In our above theoretical tabletop system, we can't let ourselves do more actions, so we make our actions better. For example, instead of giving the fighter bonus attacks, we just make his attacks really strong, or pull a DCC and make the fighter do damage even on a miss. His action is still limited to one, but it always has some usefulness or is just far and away better then a normal action.
Another method is for setups between party members. You can't have two actions, but you can make somebody elses action way better. The problem with this is usually how its implemented. Wasting an action on buffing somebody else, or placing a minor debuff on an enemy, feels like a waste of your limited turn, so instead these need to be worked into the normal system. For example, if you attack an enemy, the next party member to attack that enemy gets a bonus to-hit based on your character's leadership skill or what not. Another idea is to tie multiple actions together. For example; a Cleric heals the party members with their spells, but gets to Bless them for free when they do so. This ability may come from a better spell or for free based on their level. While technically not giving them multiple actions, they can essentially accomplish multiple things at once but only in specific situations. While not at all equal to having multiple attacks, letting Fighter split up damage to multiple foes or get free autoattack counters on people just seems perfect for an "almost breaks the rules" sort of thing. If anybody should get it combat, it would be the Fighter.
The second way to embrace the action economy problem is to do away with it entirely. By reducing a single combat encounter or situation into one contested roll, or by using new forms of initiative or interaction. I've done this myself a few times; my current game features a low-magic dungeoneering party with many first time players. For their combat or trap encounters, I have them simply perform popcorn initiative, with whoever wishes to go may go and then the opponents get to go, or something happens in reaction to their action, and so on. This allows people to participate at their own pace, and doesn't force people to play if they don't want, but I make an effort to give everyone a chance to shine. This goes beyond the scope of this (very long) blogpost though; dealing with player psychology and table politics is already such a specific learned skill, your own experience would serve you better then anything I could recommend!
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