I love horses. They are elegant, powerful, majestic creatures worthy of praise and honor, both for their place in history and in fantasy fiction. At last, you can now combo with a unique mount! Wistblade uses a mechanic called Duos that provides for a meaningful and instant partnership with another creature, creating all-new game mechanics and story possibilities!
Combo-ing with your Mount via Duos
When two creatures work together collaboratively, they form a Duo, a partnership with several major benefits, as well as few drawbacks. Duos are represented simply by stacking your cards in one of two ways (depending on if it is an animal or another humanoid you are partnering with, see image below). This alignment represents the Duo state and provides the benefits as seen below.
Why Horses and not Something Cooler?
There are a few reasons to focus on horses first. Horses are accessible. They are the gateway to fantastic beasts. Horses provide a base in terms of size and ability on which to compare other fantastic creatures and mounts, the same way that humans provide a base for other playable races in traditional fantasy RPGs. If your mom, child, or other non-fantasy-fan friend plays Wistblade with you, horses will likely draw them in and give them a base on which to visualize the rest of the fantasy world.
Second, horses are good for testing game mechanics. They have a long history of breeding and are extremely varied in shape, size, colors, and grooming, much like dogs. Each breed is always beautiful, intentionally specialized, and provide an excellent base to test my, as far as I’m aware, fairly unique game mechanic of being able to partner with your mount for chases, fights, travel, and some types of everyday work. If the variety of horses don’t break my system, the variety in other race mounts probably won’t, either.
Third, I believe horses are foundational for fantasy sandbox. More even than elves, trolls, or dwarves, horses to me are the “other race” that completes the concept of medieval fantasy. Add whatever you want on top to sweeten the cake, it’s the horses and the humans that are the butter and batter. Since Wistblade is meant as a “vanilla sandbox” designed to be modded, it makes sense to me to focus on the horse alongside humans.
Flight Breaks Games
Finally, I feel flight breaks most role-playing games. I’m not saying I’m anti-flight. I’m saying I don’t like how most games design flying mounts and flying combat, and for the moment I’m not sure if I can fix it to my own satisfaction, and thus am currently not planning on having flying creatures mount-able (they’ll be too small to mount by a human). A few examples of how flight breaks games are:
- flight creates an enormous inequality in travel speed that is hard to balance
- flight completely negates melee attacks. Just keep firing a range weapon at all the melee people from above; instant victory! Or, it mandates every melee fighter must also have long-range weapons to survive. In my mind, this muddies up characters’ roles until “everyone can do everything” and thus “no one is special.”
- flight trivializes many physical obstacles
- flight rarely has sufficient danger and consequence to balance its perks
- flying creatures usually trump non-flyers in every aspect; once you get them there’s never a reason to go back. Flyers are larger, faster, do more damage, and in general are designed to be a mount upgrade in every way. Perhaps there’s another way that won’t have characters casting off their old mounts forever?
- flying makes travel weird and the only geography you get to experience is pure air on all sides. While that one aspect is great, it essentially limits travel to a single biome experience. It lacks the variety, majesty, and challenges of land travel.
The Battle of the Pelennor Fields & Helm’s Deep
Wistblade will not be complete until you can clash armies, defend ramparts, blow up walls, trample enemies with horses, or squash you by a giant. These fight scenes are what I want my game nights to feature, and what Wistblade’s combats and mechanics should ignite in the imaginations of its players. High respect for mounts, animals in general, and the power of creature size, attack position, and group formation are all essential. I’ll be talking more about Wistblade combat soon. Stay tuned!