Jolts

While The Snarl is not solely focused on combat, it does have a robust combat system. We had a few specific design goals for making combat more interesting:

• No Wasted Turns. We wanted each character turn to do something, even if you miss an attack. Everyone hates long combats where you get your turn, roll poorly, and have to wait half an hour to do anything else.
• Some Realism. Everyone’s familiar with hit-point systems where characters are whittled down by a thousand paper cuts until they suddenly keel over — but at 1 HP they are still fully capable. Real fights involve working your way through someone’s defenses with exchanges of blows and blocks/dodges until you can get a solid strike in — and that strike should have an actual impact on their ability to fight.
• Buildup. A few games have mechanics where the characters get bonuses if a fight drags out. The intent is to keep combat from becoming a slog and also to make it end in a cinematic/heroic way. We wanted something similar, but based more in the idea that you take advantage of weaknesses and openings in your opponents’ defenses.

What we settled on was a system based on what we are calling jolts. I won’t going into all of the details of the combat mechanics here, but jolts serve as a sort of metacurrency that represents the weakening of your defenses, the increased potential for an opponent to find an opening. Jolts that accumulate on you are used by others against you. The more jolts you acquire, the more likely an opponent is to get in a good shot.

If I attack an enemy and combat and miss, I still inflict a jolt upon them — they have to defend or otherwise get out of the way. This knocks them a little off-balance, ties up their footing, wearies their muscles, loosens their grip, or otherwise discombombulates (what a great word) them for a moment — and that presents an opening for you or someone else.

Various abilities can be used to inflict jolts (or extra jolts) upon an opponent. This gives options for less combat-oriented characters to distract or rile up enemies.

When attacking, you can choose to spend any jolts that have accumulated on your opponent for a better attack — you are taking advantage of those openings to get a better shot in. There are also a number of abilities that allow you to expend jolts on an opponent for bonus effects, such as knocking them prone. Sometimes you may use abilities that inflict jolts upon yourself, representing that you are acting in a reckless manner.

Jolts accumulate on both PCs and NPCs. The longer a fight goes on, the more jolts the combatants are likely to accumulate, and the more likely it is for an opponent to get a serious strike in.

In gameplay, we’ve been using tokens to represent jolts, but you could just as easily keep a list of characters and a tally where everyone can see it. We will produce jolt tokens as a game-play accessory (the ones you see in the picture are from another game, used for playtest purposes).

Jolts are just a part of what we think makes The Snarl’s rules unique, but we think they’re pretty cool. In fact, we are referring to this rules system as the Jolt System for now — we’ll see if that sticks.