Playing As An Adventurer/Non-Landed Character In Axioms: Magical, And Mundane, Combat
Live your LitRPG/Portal Fantasy Fantasy
Introduction
Note: If you have a specific question or feel I left something out I am happy to expand on specific minute details on the comments, you you can go to the Discord which is more active or the Reddit sub which is less active which are linked on the side bar.
The goal of Axioms Of Dominion is to allow you to play a wide variety of roles that simulate the experience of being a character in a fantasy novel. You don’t have to try to conquer the world. You could arguably place something of a slice of life character on an adventure though the game is more geared towards at least some sort of growth arc.
The most obvious, and heavily support, of these roles is the Adventurer or Dungeon Delver. You could also be a Mercenary, a wandering Mage, or an itinerant Merchant, though that last might be less likely to do the combat themselves and prefer to hire guards. I’m going to briefly talk about the “typical gameplay experience” of each role before diving into the magical stuff.
Merchant
So a Merchant or Factor can function in a variety of ways. Peddler of rare goods, grain or metal magnate, merchant fleet owner, etc. You can own production buildings or not. You can sell premium goods or staples. You can sell to armies/generals, mayors, nobles, or other merchants. You could run a caravan that moves the goods of others, etc.
You would need to cultivate relationships, though less focused on landed characters unless they were customers and more on sort of lower social tier characters like other merchants or adventurers. Your life typically wouldn’t be as exciting as a ruling class character though it may feel such if you come across a rare artifact or something. You might personally, or as part of an association, pressure political characters to pass trade friendly laws or you might mind your own business.
Merchants, like nearly every other role archetype, can technically combine with landed or political roles. A merchant baron or count, a criminal in the underworld moving illicit freight, etc.
Mercenary
I believe I’ve talked about being a mercenary a little before. I want to rehash and maybe add some detail prior to the non-giant army combat information I am putting out. Mercenaries can do a lot of stuff outside of being in a true army. Guarding trade caravans, assisting adventurers, pillaging, taking personal missions.
Training their skills, especially for mages but also martial characters. Organizing their company, hiring, firing, logistics, getting intel to decide what jobs to take. Something more like the mercenary characters in Valdemar vs Black Company or Malazan, although you can also do that stuff but that is more giant army type content.
Sanctioned raiding, banditry, underworld crime stuff, attacking trade caravans or convoys and such like that are all issues in Axioms. Ruling class characters of various tiers all need to do work to keep down disorder in their lands or cause it in the lands of their enemies. This is all stuff mercenaries might be used for for various reasons and mercenary captains can specialize in these activities rather than the great melee.
Mage
So of course the most important character option for a fantasy game is the mage. Mages are the best. Mages can be mercenaries, sell logistical services in special cases like weather or portal mage or even summoner, and can run magical academies. Mercenaries and adventurers and even martial characters can have guilds/orders as well technically but the iconic academy is magical. Well obviously merchants can have guilds.
Mage is really more of a portion of a composite role. Mages who get involved in politics, who run schools, who are mercenaries or adventurers, there’s a magical “version” of every other role, really. How much relationship building and networking you do as a mage depends on your other role. More for politics and merchants, less for mercenaries or adventurers.
Axioms has a massive number of magical aspects/spheres/schools that have meaningful spells and differentiation. Many of these besides combat would be helpful for adventurers or scholars. Almost every aspect has some utility for combat, though.
Madcap
Madcap is essentially another word for adventurer and I wanted to keep with the alliteration. Adventurers can engage in a variety of activities and technically there’s no code in game that defines you as one, unless an Adventurer’s Guild is generated I guess. In fact all the roles are descriptive rather than part of any game code.
Adventurers often engage in monster hunting, indeed you can have this as your sole purposes, in a properly organized part of a properly magical game world. They may also delve into dungeons or lairs or caverns. They might journey into swamps or forests for rare monsters to fight and rare materials.
Master Craftsman
Craftsman can focus purely on their own efforts, although the in game rewards are somewhat limited unless you wanna roleplay real hard. Fame maybe? They combine very well with merchants, mages, and madcaps, though. Mercs sorta? You’ll spend your time training your craft, socializing with patrons, and potentially searching our rare resources from merchants? This is really not intended as a heavily supported playstyle in the base game.
Martyr
Well or any kind of religious character, actual martyrs are pretty shortlived, heh. Magic and divinity are intrinsically connected in Axioms since it is a fantasy game with extant deities. You may have read some of the posts about religion and magic or religion and politics. Religions are a distinct source of legitimacy from secular power although you can have both. It is much harder to replace the religion of a populous than their secular leader. Priests get access to somewhat unique magical options, in some cases, as well as the support of co-religionists where appropriate.
There’s a ton of support for the experience of being a priest. Whether that is a paladin, a fantasy Richelieu, or w/e you like. I really wanted religion to be powerful yet not gamey. This is supported pretty well due to intrigue and politics support for/from other parts of the game.
Magical Combat
General Info
Now we get to the main topic of this post. Non-mass-military combat, magical or otherwise, can be directed by the player. This is because you only have one character. Whether a king or a knave you are probably going to be fighting 3-4 battles max, and usually less in a personal fashion. These fights are essentially turn based tactical fights but they proceed in a way different to what you are probably used to.
I designed the combat section of character development with inspiration from my many arguments about why DnD combat in crpgs is bad and should be replaced by more interesting and varied content. Basically my argument is for a path/talent based system, rather than strict classes or loose skill based trees.
Since Axioms is a world simulation and your character will actually have a real background and not a generic “background” there were some small changes compared to a more pure rpg game. Axioms has a more open creative spell system compared to most rpg or tbs games as I’ve previously discussed.
Combat Format
Axioms uses a “tick” based system which is pretty similar to turn based systems with something like initiative. Every combatant, which are almost always individuals rather than units, has a single base action. They all have a movement speed. You can move or act with an action. Various items/buffs/etc will give extra capabilities. 2 actions or move and act or 2 moves and so on. Spells are actions.
Buffs, debuffs, aoe, environmental effects, and DoTs lose 1 duration a tick and activate any effects once a tick. Everyone can do something every tick unless they are under a control effect.
Effects all stack linearly. The same DoT/environmental effect activating refreshes the duration. Battles will be reasonably long given you lots of room to maneuver. If you’ve ever wanted to play a DoT or Debuff or Affliction mage this is your game. Because I went way too hard on that.
RPG Vs Simulation Differences
In the RPG form that I originally developed this concept for characters got some number of Aspects of varying kinds. “Stat Blocks” didn’t have any abilities or passives but they allowed you to unlock true Aspects and to formulate your build. There were social, learning, crafting, physical, economic, criminal, and combat Aspects and then Magical Aspects connected to those.
Axioms doesn’t use the Aspect system for most non-magical things because the social simulation and the character capability simulation are so much deeper than a typical CRPG. The same goes for crafting and economic stuff. But it does retain the basic framework for magic.
In the RPG version Aspects require certain thresholds of the 24 “stats” I organized, are limited in number to some degree, and typically contain 4 “things”, whether that is a passive of some kind, an action, an ability, or a spell. There are 2-4 tiers for each. This is too restrictive and gamey for Axioms obviously. Aspects are more like research choices than miniature skill trees. You can’t learn them by “leveling up” quite the same way as a traditional CRPG. What is available is based on your area of the world and what you find in ruins or learn on your travels.
Magic Systems
I’ve talked about these before and even listed some but I thought I’d go into more detail. So as noted above Aspects are more open than they were previously. Think something like Master of Magic but with far more Aspects with a stronger focus, no limited/hard coded spells to a large degree, and you have far more ways to learn them.
I think I discussed this in one of the other magic posts but Axioms sort of has multiple magical systems. Not every game will probably spawn them all, unless you use larger map sizes and even then you’d still have to locate and identify them.
There’s the basic research system which can interact with a few different magic systems depending on world gen, there’s the words of power that you can combine to craft your own spells, there’s divine magic, there’s one system semi-similar to the RPG style where you aren’t a researcher but are bestowed magic. You can find books and other artifacts like cores in ruins or from monsters. You can create your own “magic system” with class artifacts and magical rituals that can then provide magic, based on the rules chosen and power you provided.
Aspects
What are the actual Aspects? So you have piles and piles of different magic Aspects. Water, Earth, Fire, Wind, Light, Darkness, Life, and Force are the Core Aspects. The “Primal Aspects” are Time, Space, Arcana, Abstraction, Planar, Dominion, Thought, and Gravity. The Core Aspects combine into Composite Aspects which I’ve discussed here:
There’s also more Esoteric Aspects higher up the composition chain especially when you start adding Primal Aspects to the composite.
Synergy
The goal of an adventuring/delving character is to generate synergy. Say you want to be a control mage with support as a secondary option. You’d take Water, Earth, Mud, Life, and then Wood. For more pure control you’d take Water, Wind, Light, Lightning.
For DoT/Affliction you’d take Darkness, Water, Fire, Acid, Poison, Earth, Decay, Life, Rot, etc. Gaining access to more different options. Of course with the research ability vs pure skill trees there’s more flexibility.
For raw damage you might take Fire, Earth, Magma, Wind, Ash, Light, Radiance or something. For support it would be Water, Earth, Life, Light, Air. Maybe Time or Arcana if you are lucky on your options.
I could go over buffing and debuffing and all that but you get the idea.
Control Magic
I should probably go back and read previous posts to brush up on what I’ve already discussed but that is so much less fun than winging it.
Control Magic can involve status effects or terrain alterations or displacement effects. Rock walls, winds blowing things around, lightning bolts stunning your nervous system. Gravity fields or root snares or pits. Physical Combatants can apply some control effects as well. Combat Aspects are arguably still Magical. No bland generic soldier could shrug off strong shocks or blazing flames effectively.
Control effects stack their durations linearly and typically are additive rather than refreshing. Whereas repoisoning someone with the same ability merely resets the duration to full, hitting someone with a second lightning bolt adds the full control effect time.
Of course there are item and ability and natural modifiers to control effects. But generally in a fight if you can deploy multiple control mages on a single strong target you can maintain a full “stunlock”, as long as you don’t run out of mana of course. For adventuring or duel guantlets or dungeon delving or other such things happening within a single game turn you are playing a resource management game mana wise for spells. This is why typically combat control abilities like bashes have single tick or at most double tick durations since they don’t require lots of, if any, mana.
Different control effects can cost less if their control is less restrictive. Slows cost less than stuns, blinds general cost the least, snares/roots are relatively low cost since you can still use actions, AoE obviously boosts costs for all control.
“Walls” typically have their own Health and Armor and sometimes Resistance. They occupy space as well. Keeping strong melee enemies away is quite valuable and walls are usually AoE so they can’t just be run around. Grease or Ice and such exist as well.
Support/Buffing/Debuffing Magic
Support Magic involves boosting mana or mana regen, reducing spell costs, taking damage in place of an ally, healing, and generating extra actions.
Buffing involves boosting magical or physical damage, move speed, physical and magical damage mitigation, and so forth.
Debuffing sort of encompasses Support and Buffing but with negative polarity.
Adventuring And Dungeon Delving
So typically you’d have a party of 3-9 characters, no units, and you’d be fighting anywhere from 1 to 40 “monsters” or potentially 3-9 mercenaries or other adventurers. So you can see that these fights get quite intense. 10-80 ticks, usually closer to 10, are possible. Planning out buffing, debuffing, resource management, damage application and control magic application will be quite detailed.
Depending on the state of the world, just as for mercenaries, you’ll have more or less opportunities to adventure. Adventuring also can’t often involve world ending events like many DnD campaigns because you exist inside the larger world simulation with no DM support. It won’t be quite slice of life but “plot” will probably not be strong.
Aside from unexplored wilds and secret caves and lairs and such as an adventurer in Axioms you can really dig into the politics and social aspect since we are simulating a world with a moderately detailed social simulation.
So for those of you who prefer sneaky/stealthy/criminal classes and social and musical classes and such that might be exciting.
Conclusion
Axioms supports a much wider variety of playstyles, and I think in a strong way, than a traditional social sim, rpg, or tactical combat, or strategy game. Hopefully the potential players will feel like this support is sufficient to provide a great experience. The goal is for the military, economic, political, and rpg/magical sections of the game to integrate well, creating something more than the sum of the parts. I am hoping people can consider that rather than playing 5 games in one which often has bad results the goal is for the experience to be seamless when you switch focuses and for each part to complement the other parts.
If you have specific comments, questions or complaints, please post them below as I’m happy to answer about specific stuff or expand on something you feel I left out.