Making 'Fallout' for Tabletop (or How to Be Different but the Same)

[Music] hello uh welcome to DDC 2024 everyone uh thank you for coming uh my name is James Shen I'm a senior game designer at the multiplayer group I've been in the gaming industry uh over 25 years and I've been a game designer for over 15 of those during which I've been very fortunate to work on all sorts of games uh and genres for 4 years from 2017 I designed the tabletop game Fallout Wasteland Warfare It's a Miniatures game based on the Fallout video games in this talk we'll look at how I converted the Fallout game play uh and its World from video game to tabletop and why I made the choices that I did at every step though I noticed the same question arose when to be different but when to be the same so we'll look at how ass setting the boundaries help me understand the type of game required how the setting itself heavily influenced the decisions and game design and also how some of the game Mechanics Work or were not included

if you're not played Fallout uh fallout is an action adventure game with combat and survival set in a post-apocalyptic setting uh with a lot of storyline and quests it did start as a strategy game uh for the first couple of versions but recent versions have been open world so first of all what boundaries were there because we we never designed in a vacuum uh so exploring and understanding the boundaries from the start was essential because boundaries set are design space and then once we know those we know that anything within that is what's possible so first the license itself so the publisher had the license for a Miniatures game and the license for a board game was already held by another company so therefore no boards right from the start so that meant I'd need rules to allow free movement and not use printed spaces and also a system to measure that movement so therefore it was going to be a war game so from this on the Left To That on the right so this was really helpful big

First Step but of course there was a lot more to work out so there were two key audiences the first one was existing fans of Fallout that's a huge audience covering a wide spectrum of uh Gamers some would be tabletop Gamers uh and some of those would be War Gamers but there's no point having such a really big license if you don't appeal and sell widely to this existing group uh of Fallout existing fans I had so I had to assume that a small proportion of these fans would have wargame experience so I'd actually need to make it quite an accessible game and I'll refer to this group as general Gamers as we gone they would expect narrative and story uh which I'll talk about a bit later so it would feel like the video games the other group were War Gamers so much more dedicated players they purchase a lot of Miniatures play competitively excuse me so some would be familiar with the Fallout video games but also some would not so this group they'd accept a higher complexity it's not required but it

definitely needs enough uh to provide gameplay depth and they generally favor balance over the narrative experience due to often playing competitively the trouble is the danger of trying to appeal to two different audiences it can require too many compromises and result in not appealing to either of them and just before I move on the I should mention that we decided early on to make a separate cut down version of the rules for competitive play so that's playing in like tournaments or in store uh and that's because competitive play is so different to playing just fun uh I mean it's fun to play competitively but just when there's nothing riding on it uh and competitive play requires as little randomization as possible beyond the the dice rolling um so no drawing cards no events so that meant I'd need to design the game so these story elements could be removed uh if needed for that so what about other products in the same space so we could use a couple of criteria to map out the competitive landscape at that time um using size and complexity

uh sorry so I mentioned the different requirements for complexity from the two audiences waste and warfare needed to be simple but not too simple to suit both the audiences so that uh white bar in the middle the complexity of X-Wing felt like a really good level for this but it couldn't be as simple as X-Wing as well x-wings move and shoot uh they don't need to pick locks or hack terminals or climb buildings so the area shown would be the Target in terms of complexity and then there's size by which I mean the rough number of models on on the table uh during a game the action in The Fallout video games is Skirmish level at most just a few on either side there are very few large battles so a lower miniature count would fit Fallout well but it also allow greater focus on the individual characters which is great that's more like the video games and it would also make it more affordable to General Gamers who may not purchase as many extra Miniatures but also Skirmish level war games at that time was a growing area and still is so the area shown would be the Target and fit pretty well for both

of these two audiences so around here would be good but fallout's got such a lot of story there's actually a third dimension that I thought I'd consider and by story um I'll talk about that quite a lot um story narrative is what I think happens during the game rather than pure combat where just some you get some intro text uh at the start but other War Games don't really have this uh Middle Earth strategy game um has a bit so it's raised there on the the ZX but stories really seen more in board games meanwhile The Fallout video games are heavily narrative so they'd be really high on the story access so story would give Wast the Warfare an opportunity to stand out whilst also being required anyway to portray The Fallout license however would the intended audiences accept things being done differently at all and if so how different if a new game is not different to an existing game why would players leave the game they already play uh or are already invested in but if a new

game's too different well they won't play it or they won't even consider it so we need to be somewhere in the middle a bit different but not too different now a license is a difference but I would argue a license is almost never certainly never enough on its own to be the only difference so it needs something else is needed to move it across into that green section so some difference in the gameplay and or rules is needed to make it different and actually it's those rules changes that are what needed to make the game feel like the licenses experience however players may surprise you uh what they consider as to adventurous uh these are the dice uh in Wast and warfare and I'll discuss them later but when I was demoing Wast and Warfare at a a show a passerby took one glance and said to their friend it's got those role playing dice and rolled their eyes and wandered off so even the number of size in your dice uh can be too much for some players but it was a reminder though that not all players see the same changes the same way uh and it's also

important not to overstep the mark for too many of them at least so already I can see there are boundaries that would help shape the game but there are also some conflicts primarily between these two audiences which I'd need to cater to so understanding the setting was also essential too uh especially the limitations or requirements it may create how similar could Wast and warfare be and how similar did it need to be so knowing the source material was understandably uh vital at this point when I started the project I uh played probably about 70 old hours of uh Fallout 4 so I thought I had a good start but I mind any Source material I could find absolutely everything so I looked at how the game mechanics worked in the video games Health healing damage types armor and that sort of thing there were lots of principles uh that seemed usable so then I looked at relative markers the strongest and weakest uh the

fastest and slowest I knew the um if I knew these everything else could be spread within those limits so I started plotting maximums and minimums and had vast amounts of of spreadsheets as I find with any any game design and I plotted out stats and damage and hit points and so on and if I could understand the relative spread of these things uh in the video games I could portray the same thing or the same feel of Fallout by roughly rescaling those numbers and rescaling would definitely be needed because I think numbers from a video game almost certainly won't be directly usable for a tabletop game and some examples of this a bit later conversely identified areas where game mechanics required for tabletop had no equivalent uh in the video games tabletop is turn base so turnone order system is going to be needed uh as I mentioned movement and measurement be needed but I I'll talk about mechanics more uh in the next section my familiarity with the source material really helped uh me tie my game

mechanics to those of the video game so it would feel like Fallout for's got many versions uh could they be combined are there any conflicts between them and if they were how would we choose which one was going to be the one that would uh went out so the license covered the four numbered games and a couple of years into the project uh New Vegas got added as well uh fallout 76 was an unknown and yet to be released at this point fortunately Fallout setting while spread across uh quite a lot of few decades actually feels quite similar and crossover feels quite natural so that was actually good news and the primary differences really were the characters the locations uh and the weapons but awareness of all the games to be covered from the start was actually really useful um we were going to release expansions In Waves uh new content new models new units and so on so that would cover all different parts of the Fallout world but as designing each wave in sequence just doing the

only bit that I needed at the time could create inconsistencies or it could leave uh not leave enough room for things I needed to insert later so I designed blocks of content at a time so for example I did all the types of synths I could find uh all in one go and sted them out even though I wouldn't need them all straight away rather than doing a few and then trying to add more later on so the good news was the different versions looked like they had fit pretty well uh without big issues it wasn't all plane sailing though uh for example I noticed some equipment changes like power armor especially Chang relative strength or even swapped the order as which one was more powerful uh in some of the games uh one surprise to me was that the weapons in um in New Vegas were so different uh to those in Fallout 4 uh but this research meant I could plan ahead for that and again leave space for these sorts of things and consider it from the beginning uh as Fallout 4 was the latest in the current game at the time uh Fallout 4 would be the starting point for the contest and if there were any issues uh any

older elements would be seen through Fallout a Fallout 4 lens uh if we needed to choose between them so a license setting I mean that will often provide only what's needed for the source Medium as a result it can lack detail or variety needed for a tabletop game uh like you know if only a single character of an alien species is seen in a film we don't know anything more about the rest of that species uh because that's all that's needed for the source medium um like if if X-Wing had been made in 1977 an imperial player would have only turned up with an entire bag full of Tie fighters maybe one TI Advan Rader but that's all they'd have so war games require units with a spread of different functionalities uh or aide could be too vulnerable or unusable uh so I needed to fill some of these gaps uh in Brotherhood Fallout 4 the Brotherhood of Steel that you meet are mostly par arm wearing veterans so for Brotherhood of stealing Wast and warfare I was going to need some less expensive ensive or Worse units to add depth and

flexibility to a player who just wanted to play a Brotherhood of Steel side so I used any scrap of information I could find uh rank titles mentioned only once people that were mentioned but never seen and so on across all of the games to try and give me some um initial starts on where I might be able to create these extra things from um some could be used uh uh directly and but this analysis did mean any new elements would have more natural fit and the same was true for weapons equipment in fact anything that I needed that I didn't have directly from video games but also War Games need some gaps in tactical complexity or capability no single unit or Force should be able to do or be the best at everything because that's there's no that means there's a solution and that makes the game no fun and breaks it so I actually needed to leave some gaps as intentional weakness as well uh everything needed license or approval of course um ultimately Fallout wasn't mind my story to tell so creative freedom had

some limits but I could still be creative and make new things with these sort of kernels or pieces of information as this their base and be were always really helpful very accommodating and agreeable which really helped so I extracted some World rules uh robots can't use food or chem uh super mutants can't wear power armor however I notied that Fallout is a world of exceptions intelligent super mutants Brotherhood of Steel members working to save syn rather than trying to wipe them out characters that switch sides or aren't who they seen tame death claws the list went on so exceptions were everywhere and it felt that was very Fallout so it was clear that fewer restrictions in Wast and warfare what you could utilize together would be better to allow players to portray the world of Fallout uh any way that they wanted I did create some faction rules though uh because that's just what war games have uh players usually play a single faction and they have an overarch set of rules to give that faction like

identity uh unfortunately uh a few months after launch I realized that that identity was actually already baked into the all the unit cards so the ones for each model um and players could play any mix of factions so actually faction rules and cards weren't needed at all so I tried to remove them but it was too late uh and wargamers actually I found saw uh factions without faction cards as weak even if although rules were baked into their cards individually so they did end up remaining for Fallout as well as exceptions is a World of Variety so to deliver this I knew I was going to have to create myself some tools at the start which could provide the massive Variety in all of the units weapons and equipment needed uh or I'd quickly run out of room while designing further waves and by units I mean just like individual models or well just models in general so could you could have multiple uh models of the same unit or individual

characters but units is the term I use so using a variety of weapons and equipment is also a really big part Fallout uh video game experience for Simplicity um we decided that cards would be used rather than paper rosters for someone's Force so that would make it easy to mix and match units with weapons um as you wanted to also it make the game feel a bit less war gamey um so a bit more approachable for the general Gamers more visual a bit more immediate uh and actually it was a good choice to give this variety um but did um we learned along the way that war Gamers actually some of some War Gamers preferred rosters so a list of all the their units and all their um abilities rather than cards and actually after a lot of waves of products over the years having lots of cards did become slightly tricky to manage for players if they had a lot but it's not something that we had noticed right from the beginning I'm a really big believer in right tool for the right job when it comes to this sort of game I think it

makes for interesting decision- making and increased tactics during a game so for example if your opponent needs to access terminals you can prioritize stopping their models who can hack them but that tactical texture is lost uh if every opposing model can do the hacking so as mentioned some restrictions were needed to avoid every model being able to do everything as that would just eliminate all the Tactical depth so s in the world of Fallout you are never safe uh given enough time even the strongest is never safest safe from the weakest which I discovered whilst concentrating in the night at trying to shoot people in the distance while a moat was killing me by biting my leg and I hadn't even noticed so to portray this uh I would need to ensure nothing was too powerful and nothing was too weak uh and also within that there was enough range to fill in with enough variety and we'll come back to that point a bit later but probably and obviously or understandably the video gamees gameplay provided many elements

to deliver the experience of the setting and this includes game mechanics like I said we'll cover those in the next section but some general gaml principles to be included were really clear too the action in Fallout has a reason um it's not controlling arbitrary or abstract control points or fighting to the death for no reason there's usually or always really a storyline reason behind it uh I knew I'd look to create non-combat objectives to try to achieve this so that would add story to the game um and making combat a it would make combat a tool rather than being just the pure goal also non-combat skills so hacking lockpicking and searching are really present in the video games especially because of the mini games that some of those things offer whilst you're playing so many of the characters in video games they' actually suited to combat so actually these non-combat skills if they had those it could give a lot more of the characters from The Fallout video games relevance in a war game also I really like as symmetry in games I think it gives more tactical

depth but also it makes varied games I really like looking at a table uh the same situation but having a different perspective compared to the other player because of the uh the asymmetry so asymmetric forces and also asymmetric scenarios suited Fallout the video games really well too uh so that's where I would focus and also loads of flavor in Fallout comes from like minor incidents like booby traps lock safes creatures hiding in the rubble to talk to finding a note lots and lots of things they're not the quests or maybe they're the end point of some of them but usually they just other things that happen along the way and that really adds flavor to the vast area that you're covering but they're incidental uh but I realized that Wast and warfare just wouldn't feel fall out without these so I would look for a way to try and include that so now I had the boundaries uh and I knew what elements of the setting needed conveying but what about the game mechanics excuse me

so the video games have many of the same type of game mechanics as I mentioned before the war game would need so resolving combat have health levels damage armor it could these be useful so I went through and I extracted kind of the feel and intent of each mechanic in the source and considered their playability and also their practicality uh for a war game unsurprisingly none of them were directly usable uh so there's going to have to be changes so that I need to have a be included by converting them into some kind of tabletop game mechanic or mechanism I'll use the word phrase mechanic or they'd need to be cut the thing is that when you create new mechanics if you deviate too from the source too little then the game mechanic will be unplayable in a tabletop game but deviate from The Source too much and it won't feel like the source at all on the other side uh if you when cutting mechanics if you emit too few it will still be unplayable and if you emit too many any it also won't feel like the

source so there's a real balance to be struck between whether keeping them or losing them some elements though were really clear from the start they just weren't going to work so they needed to be cut uh hit locations so legs arms torso head um added too much detail whilst being a big part of Fallout when you play um so these got cut because of the detail and the amount of bookkeeping when you're actually going to be controlling quite a few different characters not when you play Fallout in the video games you're controlling just yourself um so those were cut just for really being impractical also while some skills that I mentioned were iconic like hacking and lockpicking uh quite a few weren't relevant in a war game so there was no clear way or Reason to include them so those were cut too so stats and tests uh a if not the core part of a Miniatures game are stats and how to make U stats uh during a game uh test sorry how to make test dur game I felt the special

stats in the video game which are seven stats across the video games they all use them so strength perception urance so it spells out the word uh special they're so iconic to the Fallout games that they they had to be used uh if well not if possible it just had to be used I thought and the values range from 1 to 10 sometimes larger but usually 1 to 10 uh for those stats like the video games that seemed very suitable too it like a manageable number would work well with dice so if stat values are 1 to 10 the initial thought would be use well just use a 10-sided dice right roll equal to under your stat and you succeed the trouble with that is that players won't want to use or even attempt any skill that's got a very low chance of success especially in a game where actions were going to be quite Precious on the other hand skills are too good they're almost certain to succeed they really kill tension and ruin games they're notun to play against and actually they're not really that fun to use either so using a

10-sided dice I realized would only leave me five values that were usable for stats uh and that would leave very little room for variety between the characters that I knew that I absolutely required so I decided to do things differently uh so I used a 20-sided dice uh to make all of the 10 skill values relevant or useful so these are the the 20 Faces I created across the bottom so there are five ones they do show icons instead of the number one because they have small extra effects too but they're ones so as a result if someone had a skill value of one then they had a 25% chance of success and that's actually much better than like a one in six chance in a six-sided dice that many other war games have so it would mean that having a low skill would still really would be uh usable and people would try to use it at the other end there are three automatic failures so no skill value no matter how high is ever or would ever be a guaranteed success um so the maximum chance of success

would be 85% um sadly uh I discovered there wasn't the 17 sided dice which is what I really wanted after that so I added a few duplicates to make it up to 20 in the middle there so this summarizes the chances for each stat value 1 to 10 um so for example a skill value of five uh that near the middle has a 45% chance so this result was now I could use the full spread the stat values 1 to 10 and even go higher to deliver lots of variety and I'm glad it did CU boy boy did I need it I wish I'd explain these probabilities uh more directly in the rule book though so players better appreciated uh low skill values were still useful um just to avoid kind of Habitual prejudices uh some players have towards low stat values in games and I'm not doing that so only got a stat value of one when actually it was a decent chance first mentioned fallouts a World of Variety so I needed tools with which to create characters uh with this variety now already knowing the maximums and

minimums that I mentioned earlier to represent with these stats and also that relative spread um of the stats that I also mentioned it was fairly simple uh in the end surprisingly to allocate values to units I often created um as I mentioned values together all in one go of blocks so they fit together and there wouldn't be any clashes later uh but I also created some general guidelines for myself for groups to give them uh a flavor and like a common um common fit feel so make them feel cohesive so like her low intelligence for Raiders uh was one that I sort of um stipulated in general not always but for most many games they sort of pair each skill with a specific stat so you tend to find strength that determines their melee skill uh their agility determ their shooting skill and their endurance is their health but I was thinking this is too limiting really forite characters have got different reasons for being good or bad or what they do so I wanted for example units which were strong to be able to be good or bad at melee

combat so I created a list of skills this is the majority of them the top ones are like many other miniature games with combat and the last three are unusual for a Miniatures game but they're the ones I mentioned that are Anonymous with Fallout but rather than hardcode each skill to a single specific stat I placed icons next to the the stat I felt relevant for that particular unit that I was trying to portray so any icon could be next to any stat so to make a test you'd use the value for the stat where that skills located for example there uh we're making a shoot well shooting a rifle the rifle icons next to perception and that says roll seven or less on that 20-sided dice that we just saw it was this this gave me great flexibility and definition uh that I could give to these characters so for example the huge Super Mutant the Behemoth um uh could be insanely strong but at the same time not a skilled fighter uh because they're slow and and lumbering so I could detach those two

elements so I made their strength 13 but attached the Mele scale skill to their perception which is only three uh if strength had always determined melee then that wouldn't have been possible they'd be really strong and then would always be hitting really well all the time so different characters could use different stats with the same skill so for search as example a brute uses their perception but Soul Survivor uses their intelligence similarly for health a brute can survive in combat a super mutant um because they're tough using their endurance whilst dog meat one your companion dog can survive in combat because they're agile but also me I could create units with any number of and mixture of skills too including ones like this iBot with only a few skills I also used any detail from the video games I could find to reinforce how each unit was different too and some had special abilities um maybe what two or three at most which are down in the box there so in the end this tool set actually let let me create over 250 unit cards uh and all of them

were unique so next there two linked aspects um armor and also never safe that I talked about bit earlier so Fallout has very recognizable different armors and also power armor is incredibly tough um example of power armor seen there second from the right so I assessed the armor ratings in the video games I mentioned I looked at all the source data I could find and with their numbers a full suit of normal armor gives an armor rating of around 20 for light leather up to 120 for synth armor that's quite a big range to cover um to convey because the you know the strongest being six times the weakest but the armor rating of the toughest power armor is 100 times the lowest normal armor so I realized I couldn't I couldn't have all powerful models I couldn't leave power armor out and I needed a range of different Power Armor or non-p power armor grades to to play with as well so that was actually quite a design

challenge so as mentioned power arm is really tough everything can kill you and also we now know that Health would be based on a stat and that would probably be between 1 and 10 so I thought well the average health I'm going to aim for is probably around five or six um and the survivability or Pace um of attrition that we want for a game like this usually means an average for an unarmored uh model they're probably going to get removed after two or three decent hits so two or three hits if the health was five or six we could change that last box to read that the average damage then was going to be two or three that was actually quite nice to kind of know that that was kind of what I was going to aim for and it meant I knew that attack damage would probably be between probably not up to six for really powerful weapons um on average uh and that would help me then when I came to create all the weapons but now I knew what sort of uh range the damage would be I could consider how the armor could work too one way would have been to use a deductive armor system um that's where

damage is reduced every time by the armor value of whatever's been hit I find the problem with that is that you model with an armor of one can ignore uh anything that does only one damage that makes it Untouchable to some and that's a gamebreaker uh and boring so personally I dislike directly deductive systems for this reason and also they're really hard to balance at low damage values which is where I was going to be as a single increase armor is such a big difference so I knew I needed to do something different so I created the armor dice um when you get hit you roll the armor value uh or um you roll the dice if you get the armor value or lower that blocks some damage that's fairly normal but actually I decided what you roll is what you block now the dice you can see the results on the over on the uh side there goes from 1 to four so for example if you have an armor value of three if you roll a three you block three roll two you block two roll one you block one but

if you roll four you block nothing because it exceeds the armor value so that means that better armor um can be can block more damage that's good and also it will block something or some amount more often uh if it's higher compared to lower armor but some attacks can still get through and I think that sort of occasional failure that's fairly weighted feels more cinematic sometimes you know the the tough thing do fail and I also ruled then that power armor blocks one damage as well so that's in addition to whatever the dice R might be and like I said that's a really really big difference when you've got very low damage numbers so uh here's the armor card the most powerful armor in in Fallout which is the x01 uh if you're wondering what the various lines are on the upside down bit um it's because it tucks under the unit card to show the bonuses that it adds to the stats to the wearer and also when it takes damage it gets rotated to the damage side which gives you a bit

less benefit for the physical armor rating there were three different types of damage so do three different types of armor rating so physical energy and radiation straight from the video games um the physical armor rating for the power Arma there is three and then plus one that being the extra one guaranteed on top of the Roll um so that meant that it could if the DI roll block nothing then par Arma could only would only block a total of the guaranteed one this is the weakest weapon in the game The morat Bite uh I dislike completely random damage in games because it be just a bit disappointing so I gave weapons a fixed amount of definite damage shown in the red box there in this case just one and then weapons had some bonus dice um some extra effects on the bonus dice could include damage so with one bonus yellow dice the morat's attack damage can sometimes be two um and that as we saw if the xo1 par might only block one

sometimes that actually means the toughest armor can be damaged by the weakest Weapon It's a small chance so I give it that it's like one in 72 so it's not very often but this is the extreme example uh and that meant that everything in the game then was never safe power armor was very tough and regular armor where it didn't have the plus one bit um actually still made a difference uh to the game plan and felt like it made a difference so as mentioned there was a lot combat in the Fallout video games but uh that's not the entire Focus players they Fallout for its stories and quests and I wanted to incorporate that into the main gameplay like I said combat would be a key activity but not the only goal so scenario design was absolutely key to this most scenarios would given non-combat objectives like finding missing robot Parts uh maybe hacking computers open the exit getting the water pumps running Lang demolition charges I mean it just went on it's great variety I could play with often with as I mentioned asymmetrical objectives Maybe asymmetrical layout or wi conditions too although I should

highlight that creating scenarios like this uh is interest that are interesting for both sides at the same time is a lot more work and requires more testing too also had models start just further into the action not right at the edges of the board or at least if they're at the edges it would be quite a small board to play on so that less time was spent just getting to the action for more story at event cards pretty common uh in in games turn over for that particular round but I hate sudden big effects in games without notice you know dust storms don't just suddenly appear so cards with major effects were given an icon which can be seen at the bottom there on the back of the card so those cards get revealed when they get to the top of the deck so the round before they actually come into effect so that way players get prior notice and can even potentially plan in those effects or take advantage of them when this new situation arises I also added Quest cards these are minor personal objectives that are layer on top top of and completely separate to the scenario the story is on

the front and the task and reward is on the back and each player could have one active per game it could be anyone that they had and these mimic side quests in the video game um some had multiple Parts as well so it had a progression to it too again like the video game and these gave each player an extra feeling of kind of a personal story too so using the non-combat skills like I mentioned so hacking searching and lockpicking for some of objectives actually gave storyline to the scenarios and opportunities for non-combat units to shine too but also I used these skills for General interaction with the environment so hack a door to open a shortcut lot biger safe to find an extra item and so on um to F to feel more like the interaction that you get when playing the video games but also Scavenging and searching are so core to the gameplay of the full games too so I added tokens to facilitate Discovery during the games uh one type is revealed by going up next to it and interacting with it like many games but the other type gets revealed

if viewed from a distance and that really opened up the scenarios I could create to include Discovery during a game where you might get players to uh explore the uh the battlefield to try and find whatever it is they're searching for but they wouldn't have to go right up to see that that may not be the area they need to look in and some interactions with these tokens like searching a desk for example they might simply award random items but I wanted them to have expected elements too so I created cards for dangers and creatures and strangers each with kind of mini tests or decisions to add the variety in the flavor that I mentioned so for example a danger might be a trip wire and it says you have you uh trip a trip wire you have a choice to take cover which would be definite but uh reduced damage or you could test that model's agility to find and replace the pin which could result either in no damage if you succeed or full damage if you fail I quite like giving players choice in these decisions and also incorporating the relevant unit unit its details into it too so which model

actually um discovers this makes a difference also wanted to represent a growing settlement like the video games to so a player's force would carry over from game to game if they wanted but without the negative spiral where in those sorts of situations the winner gets stronger after a game whilst the loser is more likely to lose the next one uh necromunda in the 1990s taught me this um the hard way um and I wanted to avoid that so I created a settlement system uh which lets players buy structures so get caps from the game that's your reward and you can buy structures with them just on paper saying what was in your settlement that let you keep gain store and use extra cards for the next game um but without affecting the units that they could bring along to that game and their basic uh equipment so that meant that the settlement section gave players extra options of what to use in each game but still both players would start every game with the same amount of points each so it' still remain balanced whether you win or lose and as exploring is so synonymous

with Fallout I added these explore cards which are like random mini encounters um resulting in some small benefits or minor negatives for the next game and actually some of these explore cards um had consequences which got shuffled into the event deck so something you did in between the games may occur at some point during your next game Vats is another iconic system to fall out it's like a slow-mo bullet time system uh to mimic this I created a system of quick actions they're just like the normal actions in the game but they have a small penalty um and I allowed every model to gain and use them uh but straight away the game was bogged down by way too many extra actions especially lots of interruptions from reactions it was a mess and it was really slow but rather than ditch bats completely because it is so iconic uh with Fallout I gave major characters icons or specific characters icons um allowing only them to use it that was much cleaner and allowed me to to keep

it but also excuse me um including a solo and Cooperative mode so players could play versus the game rather than each other was important especially for General Gamers and actually at the time it was quite unusual for a war game so this would require creating an AI to play against I tend to find in Miniatures uh board games that mainly the AI just attacks just goes straight in um or they're very random and I don't really enjoy that so I knew it had to be simple but I wanted an AI which could do any objective uh not just combat it could behave depending on the situation and also portray the personality of the Vari inhabitants of the of the Fallout world so I created an AI card for each unit uh with a simple grid um to determine what an AI model would do each turn uh the role of these special blue dice which had various symbols for various randomizations in the game determined which Row the symbols on the

dice are weighted so there was a three and six chance the top row two and six chant middle row and one in six chants of the bottom row and the model's current situation determined which column so in this case the brut's health governs this uh so if we rolled a bottle on the blue Dice and the Brut is on four Health their response would be this cell and each cell contained one of five letters uh which determine the A's actions so o means do the objective that's um described by the scenario uh for that side such as steal the chemicals from the safe a is attack and the list uh of icons and um and the list of uh text at the bottom there on the right determines who or how they would attack if there was a choice so that would uh try and stop the weak units just suddenly suicidally charging the giant things that they would probably never even attempt there's also move defend and fallback but just five basic responses um each was some each had some simple rules uh on how to enact them and each scenario could provide any extra

specifics as well on how to use them there were some subtle um uh details to like a shaded run shaded cell means the model will act recklessly or care carefully here The Brute gets more Reckless or angry as it health goes down and an underline just meant it would wouldn't leave melee um if it had the choice but the waiting at the Rose that meant that a unit would be more likely to do one thing than another um given the their current situation but only from a fixed set of these possible behaviors matched to who and what they were and found that gave them the personality it was kind of um a predictable unpredictability so the different situations really helped add flavor to the behaviors too so they weren't just based on health um when not low on health this particular example the field scribe here bases their response on how many friendly models are nearby if there are two or more they're confident mostly objective focused but if there's only one or no friendlies around they're cautious and they W even try the uh the

objective when I first tested this system uh I had some AI super mutants they ran into my base they stole the item I was guarding and they ran off with it while defending the person carrying it I was really annoyed uh it beaten me uh whilst at the same time being really proud of it it was um very confusing mix of emotions uh this tool set allowed me to give um over 250 uh unique AI cards giving all the Fallout inhabitants their own behaviors to feel like the video game and that was possible because I had created a flexible tool set to help me achieve that ease of play was important to suit the general games from the start I used movement rulers rather than take measures and color coding uh the rulers that are seen here they're very quick to use didn't look too wargame and um rulers had worked well for X-Wing which is very popular so that seemed like a good thing to use though using rulers was contentious with a few War Gamers uh who preferred take measures um I colorcoded icons as well to make it EAS easy to find the required stick or the required dice uh and I spent a lot of

time creating a color blind assistance system uh which was clear but also without interfering for non-color blind players too and it use the um you'll see on each of the sticks the corners are slightly different um and I put those on the icons as well to help pair them together but also the amount mixture and color of a weapon bonus dice describe that weapon's character to a player at a glance too as each uh color was more likely to have one specific effects so whether it's damage or accuracy or armor reduction for the black green and yellow dice also I use icons wherever I could instead of text to make things quick to read and save space which was critical uh with only a limited amount of space on cards and especially I'm a big fan of great use of icons in board games to Critical Hits are a big feature in the video games uh where a player can fill their critical meter and then activate it for a big and guaranteed hit so I added a way for models to charge this up uh and gave each weapon a critical effect to at first every model

could do this which uh you won't be surprised to hear like Vats was far too fiddly and slow to track so similarly I ended up giving just some characters or units access to use the critical hits there were some for elements was able to include fairly directly uh perks or extra abilities and are very familiar to Fallout players I included as many as possible using the same names applying the equivalent benefits and put them on cards they could then be given to any unit chems are also very much part of Fallout so I replicated their effects and like power Arma the cards slide under the unit card to show or align with the unit card to show their benefits and each round the card slides under by one column to give a reducing effect over time and if you fail a test afterwards if you're addicted to them you rotate it and that gives you the negative effect if you are addicted bosses um Fallout has some incredibly powerful enemies which are really hard to include in a skirmish Game Force because they cost so much of your total points if not your entire force so actually I made separate cards

for bosses to allow them to have different phases so they'd be like bosses of video games and have changing tactics and changing characteristics as the fight would continue if you played them all in one go but also players could use either all the stages they could use just a single stage if they wanted uh and that would mean it was easier to incorpor incorporate them into your points cost and put them on the table and actually meant it was more often you would get these great probably very big models actually onto the table also also while there were single unit cards for each robot I mimicked the robot building of Fallout 4 as well by making mix and match cards of players could assemble different head torso and legs so I put the I split them out so the skills and brain related skills are on the head card armor and physical related stats on the Torso and movement and Agility on the leg cards you can't always win though uh in addition to some of the false starts with the game mechanics I mentioned uh mix and match rule sets need clear guides and suggested usage over the time I'd created various modules allowing players to play almost any aspect of the

Fallout video games not just purely a combat scenario so campaigns exploring the Wasteland uh generating Dynamic vaults full set uh full settlement system um a role playing game a solo choose your and Adventure I mean there were a lot of different ways you could play it but it allowed you to tailor the game to anything you wanted my experience though was that most players actually want to be told what to use uh and if not clear commun iic a required uh if it's the players that have to make that choice but that's actually difficult if later modules that will add these choices aren't known from the beginning uh and there were some that we didn't know that we were going to create until later also sometimes there are preconceptions that you can't overcome uh I mentioned having the number of sides on the dice and put people off uh but also the faction rules as well and that's fine as long as these things only affect a small number um of your audience but sometimes there's no right choice uh create a small tokens get enough onto two counter sheets um so they weren't also they just kind of make

sure they weren't intrusive when they're actually on the uh on the table but some players felt they were too small um but if we'd used larger tokens they would have felt more intrusive on the table but also it meant there probably wouldn't have been space on these cter sheets for enough and that would have meant another sheet and that would increase the retail cost by several dollars to include them so there really was no winning in this situation and sometimes you just have to learn the hard way um there's one rule I made like 50-50 chances um was to flip a counter like a coin so like determining if the onire token stays or gets removed what I hadn't thought about which was crazy because I've played ball games for long enough I should have known that when the token sheet cutter punches uh the sheets it gives a round Edge on the top but it gives a sharp edge still on the bottom that meant when you flip them onto a table they're completely biased and will roll onto one side almost all the time and I discovered this whilst recording a live game play with one of the um war game channels uh which was slightly awkward um so but flipping onto

your hand works fine but most players instinctively and un blaming uh flip them onto the table so what can I conclude um someone once told me uh a game should have a maximum 20% Innovation um I didn't accept it then and I still don't believe it now it depends on what you're making for sure uh I I accept it can't be more different than the intended audience will accept so knowing those boundaries from the start really important but I mean if Innovation had maximum games that took big leaps would never have existed tabletop games like Dominion Magic the Gathering Risk Legacy to name a few so everything standard now also was different when it was first introduced uh an an innovation limit may make it impossible to create the game that you need being different does help a game stand out too it's just important to make sure the difference uh differences are because they're better and have good reason and not just to be different some of the mechanics I've mentioned were a

slightly different execution of existing ones in war games while some were new but all of them were to make the game feel like Fallout or suit the audiences with being differ not without cost though it requires communication to bring those around you on board and it's not just the players but also colleagues directors investors when you're developing uh the games if people don't know your why then they won't accept your how I find it really important to take time early on to explain these reasons to try and take people on the same Journey with me as a result their feedback will be a lot more relevant uh but also I found um nicely that people then also spread that why to other players too that really helps greatly spread the message and being different doesn't always mean being more complicated however if a game mechanic Works contr to how is normally done in similar games it actually may feel more complicated than it actually is the players who are familiar with the established approaches many of the main uh mechanics in waste

and warfare are slightly different or a lot different to existing tabletop games in isolation when I looked at them each of these made sense to portray Fallout and it seems like a small and reasonable difference but actually I realized that when added together they can make quite a lot of difference for some players a base game should not be at the maximum difference that these uh the audience can accept because further products will inevita add to the differences even if they're just adding new units or equipment and this can become too too much difference for some players if I created a second version of Wast and warfare there are areas I'd streamline um which they were very Fallout but actually they turned out to not be as important to the gameplay in the long run or they weren't required to use with other characters later on that I would create when I thought they'd be really useful tools to create this variety I've mentioned so um getting rid of some of those uh would give more room for complexity increase

layer down the line and there's no point having something that communicates the licensing experience if the players then don't use it conversely it's also okay to be the same in places using tried and tested methods when that's all that's needed works well uh because there's less for players to learn and or adapt to and also there's less that needs communicating so knowing when to be different and when to be the same depends on many fact as I've discussed a licensed game almost certainly needs to be different in some way to make it feel like the license the players already know and love as well as stand out and of course be fun a well-known quote from Fallout is that war never changes but fortunately game design doesn't have to be the same thank you um we got a few minutes if anyone has any questions just before that just a

quick reminder if please fill in the um session evaluation you'll reive by email from uh from GDC that feedback really helps um so if anyone has any questions I'll be happy to I say happy I answer them hi there hi uh I'm a ux researcher and I thought it was really interesting that you at the very beginning pulled out those two that can be quite different groups those who are like hardcore War Gamers and those who are hardcore Fallout Gam or general Gamers and I was wondering if during play testing do you ever like mix the two kind of groups um to have them play together so you might have a friend say you know who does War Games knows someone who loves Fallout hey let's play this together or to do usually keep those two groups separate during play testing it's interesting I think so internal play testing that we were doing we had um a team of six play testers who would play it and they were pretty much War Gamers um and so the person wasn't was me so I was I was non I mean I've played war games in the past but not as

a sort dedicated hobby so I was kind of the the mixture in that part uh but it is interesting and you're right it's important to do that I think we found that when people played we had like um some volunteers would help us they put on demos in stores and shows and so they were usually the war Gamers um but then people in the stores would be non-war Gamers and it was interesting so I did some shows where you you demonstrate it to people and to have that mix and uh yeah it's quite interesting to see the different reactions and what people liked and didn't like yeah if if you're able to do it to mix them up it's important because you're probably going to find that one person who's going to buy and be great about it yeah they're going to bring in people who probably aren't as well thank you thanks hello um so I was wondering um if you could speak a little more about like over time how role playing elements were sort of introduced and more specifically kind of how you balance that because it sort of said that you wanted to keep uh number and Stat values relatively low because that makes sense for a war game where two or three hits will take out a character but as you introduce more like um player sort of heroic characters how do you sort of keep from like a runaway

build just uh taking over the game in that way thank you yeah thanks um yeah a way to I try to restrict people becoming too powerful was to have this idea of these kind of Maximum settings and place them within I thought it was really important that some of the characters when you play Fallout you feel like you are certainly the character you play is really strong or powerful and has a lot more skills so and I wanted rather than have uh the the unit card and that would be it I had actually I created a called a heroic card you could add and that would actually give you access to things like that and critical hits um it might increase your it did increase your strength a little bit so I had to wait to kind of boost those those characters but I kind of thought about it with um so things like weapons you those the bonus dice when I started out and with all these crazy amount of spreadsheets I kind of worked out what have I put everything what it was all the dice Everyone likes rolling lots of dice what it was all of them would that break this uh yeah it did start with so I had to sort of tone it down or understand where the limits were um so it was important

to do that so I kind of gave People Choice what they could mix together but and then limit how much you could add as well so like you only get um uh like was it maximum perks there's a maximum number of cards and um yeah limits of what you could take with you but just the way to try and limit that too thanks hi um thank you for the wonderful talk it was really really fascinating um I'm really interested in how you approached balancing uh stats between different units um obviously with a game like this it's very complicated and challenging I imagine um so yeah I'd love to know if you had any Lessons Learned From that or yeah your approach to yeah sure so so the question is about balancing the the stats sorry I forgot to repeat the question um yeah that it's actually it just took I know it doesn't help much it was kind of a very handcrafted job um so again another spreadsheet um and going through and doing these blocks that time really helped get that separation so even though we didn't use like for the

since I had about know eight or 10 different types I'd found in the game and had them all at different levels but they were so similar it was like two two granular so you wanted them to have decent steps between them um but it was about looking at them and trying to think okay well should they be good at this should they be good at that and actually so started off i' just go through write down what I thought and just see how that landed and then after that I then find that I'd either run out of room in One Direction or needed to start higher up somewhere else as I went down there you know they got worse since or whatever they were um so it was really a lot of like looking at it but actually knowing them so well and then doing all of these units actually allowed me to um keep that in mind and compare them across different places but I kind of uh hid in the fact took comfort in the fact that I knew that as long as I was Within These maximum minimums I was all right so I kind of wasn't I didn't care but at least I knew I couldn't break it too badly if I if I got it uh badly wrong and then the play testing would help the play testers gave some feedback like you know that's too

high that's too low so I'd kind of go for the best first start but I was never the final Arbiter of what would be thank you so much no problem thanks hi all so with your game where you identify two very sort of different audiences you got your Fallout fans your traditional wargaming fans especially with such an attractive IP did you feel any extra attention trying to introduce players to a maybe a set of mechanics they aren't used to within the genre or was there any sort of consideration on how you explained these things to potentially new war Gamers yeah absolutely um it interesting so we had in the Box we had a the sort main rule book which was then broken into chapters so actually uh at the end of each chapter you could then go and play a scenario and like a not just a tutorial scenario but something B more interesting but only using those rules so we tried to introduce the rules slowly um there was also a getting acclimated booklet for people who had never played War Games before it was just even a further step back and then the scenario iOS and solo rules and stuff were in the the the other book so it was uh it was interesting to try and

introduce those mechanics and it is difficult if youve got multiple audiences I think um there's a great um uh Facebook group that we had and that's quite a mixture of people but there were other uh medium platforms we could use like some of the um uh chat forums for war Gamers we could talk to them differently as well so it is difficult though with the two audiences because you really only get kind of one main um broadcast and when there are mechanics that are quite different that whole explaining the why is different once you explain it and people read it that was great but if you don't do it early on it's really hard to then catch that later and try and get people to come back go can I just explain why we've done that that way because they're already into it and don't need the detail so yeah it was it's it's a difficult one I think to try and satisfy the two thank you no problem thanks hi hi when building up the base game are you already thinking of what mechanics are going to add in future expansions and then if so how do you determine

which mechanics to add to the game yeah that's an interesting one because we knew we were going to do wave waves and waves of of Miniatures but we also knew the things you're going to add were going to be quite modular so the units and the weapons might be different but probably no new rules so the pressure was on really at the start to make sure we had all the rules we needed to cover everything um so that was a bit tricky and that's why some of the rules that we had didn't really get used as much as the maybe the space they took up in the rule book like battlecry we can scare the other models and force them back in the end didn't really need need to be there but it was there just because it seemed like we'd need it but the idea was no new major rules unless it was for a specific module um for that alone so yeah we tried to make sure it wasn't extra rules later because the complexity would come for having more models different abilities and stuff thank you no problem thanks hi you mentioned having the six play testers on your team I just have like a bunch of questions revolving around that so someone I don't I'm more on the digital video game side I'm haven't been prev tabletop U

manufacturing so what's the Cadence are the play testers playing every day regardless if you have new mechanics and are you involved in every play test and what are like some of the things that you are observing about the play test and getting feedback on I I guess there a lot like do they get paid like as full-time and they're just playing every day regardless of a new build coming and what is the cence of a new build so to speak how often Inu things so it's interesting the way I don't know how other people might do it the way that we be doing it so get signal from the back we done now so okay so unfortunately we're out of time but I'll we'll carry on at the um afterwards the what's it called the uh the wrap up areas so I answer your question yeah which is um at 3014 or 3018 so we'll go straight out to that and I can answer any other questions people have too thanks thank you [Music]