Veil Breaches

[tukkek]

There are interesting ideas to play with around "alternate reality" Haunts, like:

• Clone: a clone of the party is made, so a player can "attempt" a Haunt without actually risking his units. The idea can be easily extended to Template-applied and Kit-advanced clones, the first being more of a thematic gimmick and the second being a "future timeline" of how the units could evolve.
• Nightmare: endless waves ramping up but the player is expected to lose at some point. Rewards are based on how the player managed to go.
• Vision: replaces the party with an entirely new set of characters. Can be extended to War Vision (replaces each character with a number of theme-consistent Encounter rolls), Lonely Vision (replaces characters with a single powerful unit), Wild Vision (replaces party with a Random Encounter of the same level) - the default would be to simply replace each unit with a equal-power random unit.

Ideally mercenaries would not count as units for these Fights.

How to implement these however is the main issue:

• Branch mechanic: would make this relatively rare and restricted - you couldn't do a Nightmare version of any Haunt except that for the branch.
• Spell (like a Clone or Enter Nightmare spell): the spell would be of extremely limited use and not worth trading player power for.
• Item: a rare item or trophy #281 that would allow a player to modify a battle before entering it. Despite technical challenges, this would introduce a whole new design space (meta-gaming consumables) that is a huge can of worms and that Javelin has managed to dodge entirely so far (and that would be better quarantined as trophies/crafting ingredients only #197).
• Locations: this might be the best approach and more thematic, with a Veil Breach (or similar "astral softspot") transporting players to a alternate-timeline version of the world and allowing Fights to happen there. This would maximize variety and replayability by spawning new Breaches that can lead to any and all Haunts (including scaling to party level).

One problem that all approaches have in common are rewards: why would a game mode that poses no real challenge offer reward or something that isn't happening in the physical world produce treasure? One way around it is to only offer experience rewards that could be brought back, making it a "tactical simulation scenario".

The Knowledge Skill could reveal details about a vision before going in. They should all be consistently safe so that players are never surprised by entering a Location and being treated to a game over. The interact prompt should also be helpful enough to say something like "the barrier between the real world and the astral plane is weak here, allowing you to catch a glimpse of a different time and place - perhaps a dream even!" regardless of the player having no Knowledge at all.

A single icon (a entryway-looking tear in the fabric of reality) could represent both World Locations and Dungeon Feature implementations of the concept.

This concept would greatly be enhanced by #244 and more Branches/Haunts being added prior.

[tukkek]

Another idea is cumulative debuffs (or player-hostile Fight Mechanics). That is probably better left on an individual-case basis to normal Haunts #33 but could be aggregated for dynamic Breaches.

Something like "fight similarly-difficult or slowly-ramping Encounters with increasing debuffs on your units". Again, on an individual basis they are great Haunt mutators but handicapping yourself to push the limit is too risky losing your main units over.

In fact, to make it truly exciting, rather than simply doing greater challenges with each wave, the player could draw something like two debuffs and pick one. From there, he can redraw and pick as many as he wants, knowing the foe he has to face (fully or partially). He can start the Fight at any time with the selected choices.

While the name need not be shown to players, the system could be called a Dare internally.

[tukkek]

There is a counter-argument to this sort of mechanic: why shouldn't the player just hire mercenaries and risk his non-permanent units rather than having entire system(s) tailored to more "softcore" content? I guess the best answers to this are:

1. Players can do that with normal Haunts, Dungeons, etc. It's built into the core of the game.
2. Breaches open up overtly-hostile design space that could be incredibly fun and impossible through usual means. Hopefully the examples here are in themselves proof of this.

Still, the criticism is valid. If better approaches appear that merge with current content seamlessly without needing to make this a separate system of its own, it would probably be even better.

[tukkek]

On the topic of rewards: perhaps players shouldn't receive gold or experience for these Fights - their units are not there, after all, even in a fever dream. Maybe the best approach is that if you win, thematically enough, the same way you can unnaturally go into the Breach, perhaps you could also bring something out into the physical dimension: namely, an unit (or semi-permanent simulacra).

If this is the way to go, the rewards can be scaled to "how much XP or extra class levels the creature comes back with" (with the base creature being the baseline, although downgrading it with negative levels or half HP per -2 CR is also possible), "what creatures do I get to pick" and even "is this creature lifelike enough to be permanent or is it just a simulacra" (which can be implemented by it not regaining HP just like Constructs).

This would require figuring out exact mechanics, which can be a can of worms, especially when it comes to how to scale the rewards to player level since you are risking nothing as the challenge itself is immaterial. The frequency of World Locations and Dungeon Features also becomes an issue.

Having the rewarded units always be non-permanent (Simulacra) solves a lot of these issues: even if there are many Breaches, the optimal play is to make the most use of your current simulacrum than to waste its health pool going to farm another one - yes, you can still do that to gather enough allies for a big Fight but at that point you're making an interesting, strategic trade-off between getting the most out of individual units and getting the most out of a one-short for the whole group of units rewarded.

Sidenote: in Dungeons in particular you wouldn't want too many instances as it'd distract a lot from the current high-tension context with for-fun fights, to the point if included in the general pool, it should be extremely rare. What can be done instead is add a Breached Branch of Breaching that makes the content something of a rare but plentiful Breach-fest while forcing the normal encounters to be much easier (the opposite effect of most Branches) by maybe making every Combatant have half (EL-2) or a quarter (EL-4) HP. In this case, the Branch should probably not provide a Haunt of its own if it's going to be a base Location type as well.

How to generate the actual Encounters and units to Fight and be rewarded with is a problem here. Perhaps just have a "whatever goes" or "always epic" Fight for the fun of it (which would also help new players figure out higher-level mechanics early in a safe manner) and then scale the simulacra down from there. Clearing no in-Breach content would result in no unit at all while each step cleared successfully would result in a better unit from Very Easy (for example) compared to party level up to better CRs.

Just adding negative levels (-1 to attacks, damage, AC and saves) is a good starting point - there are issues with minimum EL for Haunt fights (which should probably be the content inside Breaches as it's more interesting than yet more Random Encounters) and how long can a unit go in levels (such as 0 AC) but it's harmless to cop out as "you still didn't do well enough to get a creature" if something can't be easily generated on-the-spot. Units could even be named appropriately like "Useless kobold simulacrum" or 'Lifelike kobold simulacrum".

Finally, if Breaches will reward players with temporary units, it only makes sense that players should be able to choose which units to pick from. In the case of multiple units (common enough), this comes naturally with selecting which units to bring back from the Veil but it can also be enhanced by letting players choose which group to Breach with even before the Fight starts, for example:

As you step through the breach in the space-time fabric of reality before you and gaze around to the new dreamlike surroundings, you see [a brief description fo the particular scenario]. You also sense a threat before you:

[description of enemy group, complete or partially - should probably use Concetration or similar rather than Spot]

Which group do you imagine stepping up to this threat?

A. [group A, described complete or partially]

B. [group B, same]