Dev Blog

HTFAT Development Blog Entry 1

June 1st, 2023 by Doug

Thanks for checking out the very first post in the development blog for How to Fight a Tyrant. This will be the place where you can get an inside look at our thinking for things like game mechanics, rules, lore, classes, enemies, worlds, and more. Since we are just about to launch into the "open beta" playtesting phase of the game, we'll certainly post a lot here about how the game is progressing, what decisions we've made, and why. 

To get things started on this initial entry, I thought it would be fun and interesting (hopefully) to discuss where the idea for this game came from and why I wanted to create my own tabletop roleplaying game, complete with what I truly think is an exciting new system and subgenre that will advance the industry to a place where it desperately needs to go. 

Let's start all the way back at the beginning. The tactical RPG genre has always caught my eye, especially tactical RPG video games. Challenging yet rewarding, tactical RPGs are a satisfying take on the turn-based system that can get a little stale as fights, and the game, goes on. I never gave much thought to tabletop RPGs, though, thinking that if I started playing them, then I would slip down a rabbit hole of nerd-dom from which I would never escape.

Then, finally I relented in 2019 and let my cousin (another developer on this game) introduce me and my friend group to Dungeons and Dragons. My initial skepticism quickly evaporated as I quickly realized how fun it is to do something that is imaginative, creative, and even nebulous, rather than just have a computer do it for me in the form of a video game. Quickly allowing the taboo of participating in something as nerdy as DND fade, I fell in love with the game, and consequently with tabletop RPGs. I started to buy and read everything I could get my hands on, from the player's handbook to expansion campaigns. We played other tabletop games, too, with different systems. They were fun, each in their own way.

Yet, something was always missing from these games. Rather, lots of things were missing. Or things were off, not to my liking. Character creation always took way too long. The game might be drowning in lore, arcane history, and flavor text, so much so that one had to wade through pages and pages of it to get to the actual gameplay. All of the early fights would be against tons of little rats or racoons or zombies with one HP each. Not to mention the missed attacks. 

I think that is what had always bothered me; tabletop RPG creators love inaccuracy. Oh, how do we make this game hard? Misses. How do we make the player characters seem week at first and then become gods? Tons of missed attacks, then suddenly every attack lands. It's even crazier that armor factors into this, and is in fact the distinguishing defensive mechanic of a tabletop game. Who came up with the idea that armor makes attacks miss? 

No, armor should reduce damage taken. Isn't that what armor does in real life? If you slash someone without armor with a sword, it's going to chop them real good. If they're wearing armor, the armor damps, deflects, or entirely blocks the sword slash. It doesn't make the attacker less accurate. 

And that is where this game ultimately came from. It was two dudes (my cousin Greg and I, the aforementioned one that got me into tabletop games) sitting around, talking about how much we hate missing our attacks in tabletop games, how stupid it is that armor makes attacks miss rather than reducing damage taken, and that someone needs to do something about it. 

There was a whole bunch of other stuff we wanted to do differently, too. Like spell casting, spell slots, spell levels, and pretty much everything to do with magic in other games. The items in other tabletop RPGs also are a perennial letdown, so we wanted to make way better and cooler items, which we have done. Ditto for enemies. Instead of fighting rats or snakes, or whatever, that attacks once and does 1 damage, we want players fighting interesting, challenging enemies that play kind of like they do. 

All of this is just the tip of the iceberg. We've changed so much about the standard tabletop role playing game that we can honestly claim we've created a new subgenre, the action tabletop RPG. Check out the rest of our website to find out why, and stop in for playtesting once the playtest packet is available. 

Thanks,

Doug