The Design of BCS VI: Operation Actions

In BCG there are 10 general Action types, not counting things like Combine, Restoration or Lightspeed Assault that are abilities which are their own Actions to use. Meanwhile in BCS there's 5 Primary Actions and 11 Secondary Actions, which can be combined a number of ways, giving you a ton more options every Turn. 

While there's some overlap in Primaries and Secondaries, like Guard (Secondary) and Maneuver (Primary), or Use a Support Upgrade (Primary) and Use a Support Upgrade (Secondary), it ultimately does result in a much greater number of possible things that PCs can do in a given Turn.

So, to understand how the things PCs do during combat have changed from BCG to BCS, and also how some of them remained the same, let's go over all of the Actions!

Operation Action Types

But before we cover all the Actions properly, let's look at how they're divided and categorized.

• Movement Actions let you reposition around the battlefield. They're all Secondary Actions.

• Offensive Actions are those with which you directly attack a target. They're all Primary Actions and they benefit from Tension.

• Utility Actions are a catch-all category for Actions that are neither Offensive or Movement. They include Primary and Secondary Actions but their Tests don't benefit from Tension.

As you can see, while there's two types of Tests (Offensive and Utility), there's also three types of Actions. Movement Actions are specifically those that let you get in or out of a specific Terrain condition, so things like Maneuvering are actually Utility Tests. Originally, there were only two Action types (Offensive and Utility) but eventually I tagged a bunch of Utility Secondary Actions as their own thing to make it easier for them to interact with the rest of the system. By making them their own type, I can write that Ensnaring Trap prohibits Movement Actions or that Difficult Terrain punishes Movement Actions, instead of listing down all the Movement Actions each time an interaction comes up. By that same logic, Maneuver and Speed Shift are not Movement Actions because I didn't want them to trigger those effects. I might actually change this for flavor reasons though, we'll see. If anyone has opinions on the matter, I'm listening.

This section defining the Action types was written late in development and inserted in a miraculously bit of empty space right before the Actions themselves. At first, all Offensive and Movement Actions specify their types in their entries, while Utility Actions are simply all the others. During playtesting it became clear that having a robust typification of Actions listed down all in one place made for a helpful reminder when someone needs to know if an ability interacts with a given Action or not.

Primary Actions

There's only 5 Primary Actions, but most of them involve using Weapons or Upgrades, so each one has a large number of possible effects.

• Attack: We've gone over the basic attack action and the logic behind the math it uses in earlier posts, so all I'm going to say is that this section repeats the results table plus the descriptions of what Miss, Graze, Hit and Critical each do plus the example attack roll from earlier in the book to help make the lesson stick.

• Suppress: It's like Attack, but you add an optional number of Disadvantages to the Test in order to add up to four bonuses in the case of a Graze or better. These bonuses let you Mark the target (forces them to attack you or be punished with an attack of opportunity) for a Round, penalize them with a Disadvantage to Offensive Tests for a Round, make all Offensive Tests against them gain an Advantage for a Round, or you can give your attack the ability to choose Areas Maimed and to optionally disable a Defeated target instead of killing them. 

I've wanted to streamline Suppression this way for years, at the very least since I wrote the effects of Negotiation for Monsterpunk (which works relatively similarly), and I considered implementing this in BCGR, but chose not to because that game is supposed to be mostly BCG with changes that are necessary or painless, rather being BCG with changes just because I want to make changes.

Attentive readers will have noticed that Suppression with 0 Disadvantages is identical to attacking, and may be wondering if these two need to be separate Actions in the first place. The reason they're different Actions is that this distinction means you can't Suppress in response to an enemy ignoring your Mark, or twice in a Turn via Twin Strike, as those enable extra Attacks specifically but not Suppressions. Some of you already know how powerful multiple Suppressions in a Round can be, and this helps mitigate that.

• Maneuver: Maneuver is a defensive Action that inflicts one to four Disadvantages to all attacks against the user for a Round. This isn't optimal compared to attacking when in a 1v1 situation, especially with a low result in which it is worse than simply using Suppress, let alone using Suppress combined with a Weapon like Stun Rod that inflicts further Disadvantages to attacking. 

Maneuvering only shows its true potential if you can attract the attention of multiple enemies or a Boss and get a result of 11 or higher. At that point it penalizes attacks substantially, not just reducing damage but also potentially making them miss on their attacks.

• Use a Support Upgrade (Primary): By making some Support Upgrades require a Test, they're now allowed to be much more powerful as battlefield control tools. These Support Upgrades can now Miss, but they can also affect 1 target, 2 targets, or even 3 targets. Their floor is lower, but their ceiling is much higher than where it used to be, which lets the user debuff multiple Rivals or power up all their Allies at once. 

I'm a lot happier with how Support Upgrades turned out in this game, and I think they're finally where they were always supposed to be, but we'll touch more on that later when we reach the passive abilities that enable Support specialist strategies and the Support Upgrades themselves.

• Use a Repair Upgrade: Repair Upgrades work a lot like Weapons do. They each have a Base HP value, and the result of your roll acts as a multiplier. Unlike Weapons, the lowest possible result is not a failure, but healing for half Base HP instead, and the highest possible result is healing for double Base HP, instead of x1.5. The Repair Action is balanced to be a smidge stronger than attacking as a base, by moving the floor and ceiling both one step higher. A Miss becomes half effectiveness and a Crit becomes 2x Effectiveness.

This is because there's a lot more ways to buff your attacks than there's ways to buff your repair jobs, and also because Repair Upgrades are all single use by default. Unless you become a dedicated Healer, they're best used as one-shot support abilities. So I gave them this little bit of extra help at the base rules level.

I believe I've already explained in the past why I think healing abilities in BCG should be of limited use unless explicitly built around using them a lot. At the risk of being repetitive, it's basically because I don't want them to slow the game down too much. Also, robots repairing themselves in combat is not as established as clerics healing wounds is, and I want the game to represent mecha fiction more than cargo culting TRPG trends.

Secondary Actions

There are 11 Secondary Actions, of which you can take two per Turn if you're willing to sacrifice your Primary, which is worth doing in more cases than you'd think at first glance!

• Aim: You gain an Advantage against the primary target of your Attack, or two Advantages if using a Shooting Weapon. It's a lot like it was in BCG, except it doesn't take a Turn by default and doesn't encourages most of the Sniper builds in the game to become glass cannons by giving themselves a bonus Aim Action every Turn before attacking.

• Engage in a Duel: A Movement Action that invades the target's Terrain, Marks them and grants an Advantage to using Melee Weapons against them (whether you're the one Dueling them or not). Unless the target Disengages, you can Aim in future Turns to also benefit from two Advantages to your attack, bringing Melee Weapons to parity damagewise with Shooting ones, while making them excellent at drawing attention. Because it's now merely a Secondary Action, you can combine it with other Actions and do things like Engage and use an ability that stops Movement Actions to force the enemy to target you or Engage and Maneuver to force the target to either lose their Secondary on Disengaging you or to attack you while your shields are up.

• Disengage from a Duel: Also a Movement Action. This is a straight upgrade from its crappy BCG form, as in this game Disengaging only takes half a Turn. You can Disengage and Attack, or Disengage and Maneuver, for example.

• Guard: Guarding prevents the next 2 Damage that would be dealt to the user before their next Turn. This is usually better than Maneuvering in a 1v1 unless you can get a result higher than 11. Still, using both in conjunction makes one evasive and sturdy both, which makes it much easier to stall for time if you need a buff/debuff to run out or to wait until Tension increases. Even Guarding twice is pretty good if you really need to stall for time in a 1v1, as preventing 4 Damage blocks the Base Damage of most Weapons.

• Exit Terrain: A Movement Action. This one is just a way to get out of bad Terrain without having to Engage someone else, Dock, or otherwise attach some other additional effect to the Action.

• Micromanage Systems: This is the equivalent of Aim for Utility Tests, with two subtle differences. First, it can't grant two Advantages, only one. Second, it buffs all Utility Tests made for a Round, instead of just the next Test you make. This isn't going to be relevant frequently, but it will happen every now and then. For example, you could be using a Support Upgrade under Extreme Terrain, or you could use a Repair Upgrade and the My Last Stand Trick (uses a Repair Upgrade to self-heal as a Secondary Action) in the same Turn.

• Speed Shift: Increase your Priority by +1 or decrease it by -1. The effect takes place starting from the next Round, so you can't use this to instantly gain an Advantage to Attacks this Turn if your Priority is 3rd, instead you are using it in advance to help you from your next Turn onward. 

It's not an instant buff, but a tactical tool. At low PLs it's usually worth using once or even twice to make sure you're you get a permanent Advantage to Offensive Tests, even if you have to trade down your Primary Action for it. Losing out on the opportunity to make an attack is not a big drawback when you were likely going to miss or do 2-4 Damage against a Rival or Boss (before Reactive Defenses reduce it to 0) in the first place.

• Use a Support Upgrade: Half the Support Upgrades cost a Primary Action and need a Utility Test, but the other half are simpler effects that only need a Secondary Action, no roll required. They can't miss, but also won't scale up to get multiple targets. The main draw is that the average build can use them and also Attack in the same Turn. This is where I placed the Supports that resupply One-Shots, Mark Enemies and various other utility effects that would be handy to have but shouldn't cost you the better part of your Turn.

• Docking into a Base Unit: Another winner of the Action Economy Wars during the transition to BCS, no longer costing you your entire Turn. Docking is a Movement Action that lets you hide inside a Base Unit. In addition to making you untargetable, being Docked slowly restores HP. We'll go more in depth regarding Docking later when we cover status conditions for Mecha in detail.

• Undocking out of a Base Unit: This is also a Movement Action, though because you're untargetable by outside Units it's unlikely that you'll be affected by anything that punishes or stops Movement Actions (other than maybe Difficult Terrain) while using it.

• Transform: Last, and probably least, the ability to switch Forms, whether via Transformation or Unison Combiner, gets its own Action entry. That's all it really says, as what changing Forms means depends on whether you're using Transformation or Unison Combination, and so is described in full later.

There's also a sidebar that reminds you that you can do other things, like hacking the mainframe, disarming bombs, rescuing trapped civilians and so on. If you're a in a robot, those things should be Secondary Actions, perhaps rolling a Utility Test if necessary, but it shouldn't cost a Full Turn Action as it would for a character that is out of the cockpit.

War Has Changed

So why did I change how Actions work?

In earlier versions of the game I wanted to simplify as much as possible. This meant having as few Actions that involved rolls as possible, and as few Actions as possible in general. This had some unfortunate side effects, like making some Actions hard to balance (Disengage is too weak as a thing that takes up your entire Turn, Maneuver is fine 1v1 but is too strong if you're a Combiner), or limiting abilities like Support and Restoration Upgrades to very basic effects that were fine at low PLs but didn't scale up properly at high PLs (or didn't scale up at all, in many cases).

The decision also made it harder to play with the design space of movement as a cost, with Weapons like the Mounted Blaster or Superheavy Machinegun needing like four lines of text to explain how the cost functions. In BCS, the Mounted Blaster and Heavy Gatling simply cost your Secondary Action along with your Primary Action to use. That's much better.

Having Primary and Secondary Actions looks more complex than having a single Action at first glance, but it is much easier to balance and design Actions for making it worth the potential extra mental load. More importantly, it adds considerable depth, which the game needs since you no longer have to think about Movement Speeds and Weapon Ranges.

And that's Actions! Next time, we will be cleaning up the Operations rules by looking at things like Terrain, Status Conditions, and so on.

Gimmick Out.