VH Tactics Devlog #3: And now for something completely different

March 9, 2026

The Binary Star Promise is that I will get a great idea for a prototype, start something, and put it on the backburner for a bit if it’s something I don’t owe people and would need a lot of legwork. Valiant Horizon Tactics is, indeed, no exception to this. But thanks to having a genuinely atrocious week and needing a little pick-me-up, I decided I’d start thinking about it again because I do like the concept a lot.

• Part 1: https://binarystar.games/posts/itch-valiant-horizon-tactics-719774-devlog-1-healthless/
• Part 2: https://binarystar.games/posts/itch-valiant-horizon-tactics-747021-devlog-2-stamina/

What should this game even be? #

Valiant Horizon Tactics is a RUNE hack. One reason I kind of fell off on it is because I’d hit a point where I wasn’t sure about the approach. Early on I decided to glom this onto Valiant Horizon conceptually, and that was a decent idea, but with that brings some expectations from Valiant Horizon which clash with things I like a lot in this design such as:

• Keeping RUNE’s whole simultaneous-action thing
• Equipment
• Powers as a separate thing from like, normal actions that don’t work quite the same
• Attrition during travel and in combat (re: healthlessness especially, we’ll get back to this)
• A stamina resource (which despite being in early VH as per that devlog #2, is not in fact in there now)
• The hexcrawl thing in general, with stamina decreasing over time (but being maintained via rations - equipment again!)

Thinking about it more, I decided it needed to be two games.

• One is going to properly be Valiant Horizon Tactics: this one’s more explicitly like VH. “Equipment” is those Standards/Powers/etc, no simultaneous resolution (instead do it like REAP where the player flatly acts first and it’s much more offense-heavy), and other ideas I didn’t get to yet because that’s not why we’re talking about this, but the idea is that it’ll be more like the original VH: more transient, less long-term exploration type stuff.
• The other one is why we’re talking about this: take that big list of stuff above, shove it into a more “standard” fantasy setup, and expand on those ideas.

There’s also a few things I’m probably not bringing back immediately in either iteration:

• Quick vs Normal vs Slow actions. (Well I guess the proper VHT described above effectively has action priority in the same way that REAP would, but it’s different.) It’s a neat idea but the process flow needs more extra steps than I’d like and I started having to think about things like order of operations and edge cases in resolution (can a Block be slow? Can a Move be slow? When is the target of a Slow Strike declared?) and I realized this was starting to become a red vs blue function kind of thing. So instead of being a core mechanic that comes up a lot, this can just be something that slips in as a keyword now and then and complicates things situationally.
• Invoke as a thing equipment can do to use Powers, Spells, that kind of external-to-equipment Ability. Instead of taking an action that in turn takes an action, I just want to do the thing directly. (Also this makes certain object relations really weird - more on this later.) I might want things to interface with Powers/Spells somewhat but probably not in that particular way.
• I’m still not 100% sure what I want to do with in-combat consumables. Souls games are kind of weird about them in a way that I don’t want to replicate. Nobody ever uses shit if it feels like you can run out and it can be wasted on a boss fight!

As we’ll see though, I’m bringing back some stuff I left behind before.

Call the Healthless ambulance (but not for me!) #

Now, one thing I really wanted to keep thinking about in this space was the idea of healthlessness (as described in Devlog #1). Both enemies and players have no tracked health. The original idea was a kind of experiment in it. Did that experiment work and do I want to keep going with it?

I recently released NULL_SPACE, in which I leveraged a lot of the Healthless concepts developed for VH Tactics originally for challenges and especially complex challenges (in that they respect the Preparation/Cleverness/Execution trio). Players, however, are emphatically not healthless.

This makes perfect sense: a player and a challenge have very different levels of resolution. The more I thought about it, what I settled on was wanting this hybrid approach. Your player character tracks Health, but your equipment has Strike (potentially with keywords) and numbered Block values. Enemies do not track Health, but their attacks have numbered Harm values.¹

This has a few nice side effects.

• The player still doesn’t have to track enemy health, which is huge in making it flow.
• I can be more granular with what enemies can do. Enemies don’t really have attack keywords in the same way as player equipment can because the player doesn’t really have passives to play off of, nor would it be good if they did - so it helps that they have a little more play.
• It got a little hard to make unique Shield-adjacent items at a certain point if a block is a block, so having that also be more granular is nice.
• Harm vs Strike are separate words, which lets me write effects more clearly to distinguish between “things a PC does” and “things an enemy does”. (I might consider splitting Block into like, PC Block vs NPC Protection for the same reason.)

Hexes, pointcrawls, and the point (haha) of exploration #

I love how the VHT hexmaps turned out! They’re fun to write and fun to explore. (Or at least I think so.) I think I made a good case to myself justifying why they’re like that instead of a more concise pointcrawl: the value of having needles in the haystack is apparent to anyone who’s played an open-world game. I don’t think they’re a 100% substitute for RUNE/REAP-like pointcrawls, though, in much the same way that Elden Ring’s overworld didn’t prevent them from putting legacy dungeons in. So how do we combine these two ideas?

This is hopefully not going to blow any minds because this is how basically every big hexcrawl style thing does this: My proposed use of this sort of hexmap for this, as you might have guessed by that example above, is to serve as a kind of “overworld”, while “dungeons” use the pointcrawl format. I can still do the same stamina-attrition stuff as VHT on the hexmap, but we can drill down and do more specific stuff within a pointcrawl. Additionally, right now VHT maps are kind of separate from each other - if we’re doing this thing, they gotta be stitched together into one coherent, seamless overworld map (if still separated by regions).

One thing I do want to bring back from RUNE/REAP is the concept of Lore, a quantified resource of how much you know about a Realm. I don’t want it to quite do the same thing as in RUNE/REAP, though. I want it to work on the hexmap level instead. Lore is tracked per-region and means you know that area of the map well: it lets you enter places you didn’t know about, find things you wouldn’t be able to otherwise, do things you’d have to learn elsewhere, or do things like find a second entrance to a known location. You gain it by exploring the area, finding landmarks, and/or getting information from people. (It might not be called Lore later because this seems like it’s getting slightly far afield from the original concept, but it’s the same idea.)

Now what do we get out of exploration? Well, aside from just throwing stuff everywhere - which is also good, for the record - one plan is to reintroduce abstracted currency. WYRM gets around a lot of the fiddliness of money that I dislike by quantifying it into Tier X Treasures. I’m not really interested in pure tiered upgrades as such so numeric tiers are kind of whatever here, but I want to use them as Minor Treasure, Major Treasure, and Exceptional Treasure. Lumping them as Treasure means I can add a descriptive aspect to each of them, which is flavorful and everyone loves that. Also because people value different kinds of things more, that flavor qualitative aspect can matter: maybe a particular person treats certain kinds of Minor Treasures as Major for the purposes of selling things, or someone only accepts certain kinds of Treasure in exchange for their goods.

Equipment, Spells, Resources, and Complication, or: oops this is most of the post now I’m so sorry #

Now then. Let’s talk about how complicated a character can be in each of these kinds of games. I made flowcharts. (I’m so sorry.)

RUNE, REAP, and VHT are very combat-heavy games. Whatever this is will be no exception, so we gotta talk about the combat loop and how loadouts affect it. The kinds of things I care about in this case are:

• Inputs are resources or tangible-ish game mechanics. In a RUNE-like game, the obvious one is dice, but once you get past RUNE into anything more complicated than that, you’re going to usually see at least one secondary resource to add a little juice.
• Outputs are what you’re looking to get out of it. In a combat game the main idea is usually doing damage and taking it. In these kinds of games this is effectively Harm/Strike, Move, Block, Healing, and Unique Effects (a grab bag for weirder stuff which can also amount to the above). Block and Healing also directly affect your own Health, which is itself an output.
• Loadouts are equipment, spells, etc. This is what converts an input into an output: a Long Sword in RUNE is a transformative game object that can turn stamina dice into Harm and/or Move.

For the sake of my own interest, I’m also choosing to care about the window of how long an input matters:

• Lasts for right now: Things that are non-blocking or non-exclusive. If I have a passive action or something that triggers by certain events, it’s not taking the place of anything else.
• Lasts for combat: Things that are blocking, but only for right now. If I assign a die this round, I can’t assign it elsewhere. If I have a weapon equipped for this combat, it’s probably equipped until combat’s over. If I deal harm to an enemy, it only matters long-term insomuch as the combat ends.
• Lasts until rest: If I have something that can only be set when I’m at a “bonfire”, so to speak, that’s gonna be there until I respawn. If I have persistent health that gets chipped down over time, that counts.

For RUNE/REAP I’m going by the main book only, not Realms. Once you get to Realm equipment that becomes a game of “did everything that’s out there follow these design patterns²” and I don’t feel like playing whack-a-mole. Plus, I think it’s helpful to establish what the base parameters even are: things can always change in an exception-based manner later, but what is the basic expectation before they balloon out? Also I’m just not going to worry about consumables because that’s also very Realm-dependent, it’s not something you can bank on for a resource model.

So using these conceptual parameters, original RUNE looks like the following:

(Dashed lines mean indirect/optional, conditional, or requires a secondary input.)

There’s basically one proper resource and basically one kind of place to put that resource, and only Health and Runes are very persistent. So it’s a pretty simple diagram, especially compared to what’s coming later.

• Weapons input dice and output Move, Harm, and Block. Sometimes they do Healing, even (via Drain).
• The Gear inputs some kind of conditional statement and outputs various effects, but usually a conditional bonus to Move, Harm, or Healing. (You could probably put Block here too by extension but as noted above, that’s not in the main book.)
• The Rune inputs some kind of conditional statement, a special kind of active thing (like you can do X thing 1/combat) or is just passive; and outputs either a unique effect or something related to Health or Healing.

Let’s reverse this and look from the output perspective:

• Only weapons deal Harm. Gear can augment that Harm though.
• Weapons and Gear can both add Move.
• Only weapons add Block.
• Weapons, Gear, and Rune can all do Healing.
• Only Runes affect Health and do unique effects.

Usually only 1-2 loadout options can create a certain kind of output, and there’s not a 100% overlap. There’s also a lot more kinds of “lasts for right now”/passive inputs than direct resource inputs (which I’m noting here because this is going to come up later).

REAP bumps things up to 2 general kinds of resources, dice and viscera. (Viscera are technically 3 different things but they operate similarly enough so for the sake of not having these flowcharts be unintelligible, they’re lumped together). It now looks like:

• The weapon (there’s only one) inputs dice and outputs Move and Harm.
• Spells input dice and output Move, Harm, Healing, and Unique Effects (like summoning). They can also optionally input viscera to amplify effects, but you gotta toss a die in too, so it’s a second-order resource here.
• The Relic inputs viscera as a first-order resource and outputs Move, Block, Healing, and Unique Effects (like messing with stamina dice or healing summons).

Reversing to look from outputs once again:

• Only Weapon and Spells can do Harm.
• Weapon, Spells, and Relic can do Move.
• Only the Relic can Block. (Notable because viscera are a persistent resource! So you have to spend a resource to Block.)
• Relics and Spells can do Healing. (This is tied in with Block above: spells can heal via Drain, which softens Block only being available via Relic.)
• Relics and Spells both have Unique Effect locked down too.

Remember how we noted there were a lot of passive/conditional inputs above? Well, everything is based on spending a resource here, long-term or short-term. But also, pay attention to how the resources are funneled. You need dice to do Harm: viscera can augment spells but there are no viscera-first spells. Relics are viscera-first and can keep you alive (which you do want) but can’t deal Harm, aka the thing you need to do to win fights (which you also want).

Now let’s move onto why I’m drawing the contrast specifically. VH Tactics has resources of dice and stamina. This doesn’t 100% tell the whole story, though: one kinds of thing (exclusively) take dice that rolled a 1 and some don’t unless you’re spending both dice on it. So effectively we have 3 resources: Dice (rolled a 1), Dice (2+), and Stamina. Notably also, there’s no healing and Health is intentionally very nebulous.

So we map that out and…

Well, this is a mess. Let’s break this down.

• Armaments input (2+) dice and optionally stamina to augment/add effects to rolls. They can output Move, Strike, Block, or Invoke (we’ll get to Invoke later).
• The Accessory inputs either dice (2+ generally) or stamina (without dice) and can output Move, Strike, Block, Invoke, and Unique Effects. Sometimes these are conditional: spend X stamina when Y occurs and then Z.
• Your Soul (basically a class) has 2-4 abilities, one of which inputs dice (1’s only) and the rest of which input stamina. It can output Move, Strike, Block, Invoke, and Unique Effects.
• 0-2 (or more, you can take over your limit in exchange for having less stamina, but there’s no good way to indicate this and it’s already gross) Powers are used via an Invoke action - so they effectively input dice or stamina indirectly via anything above that produces an Invoke effect - and ALSO by spending Stamina. They can output Move, Strike, Block, or Unique Effects.

There’s a lot going on here, but the problem becomes more apparent when you approach it from the output side.

• Armaments, Accessories, Souls, and Powers can Strike.
• Armaments, Accessories, Souls, and Powers can Move.
• Armaments, Accessories, Souls, and Powers can Block.
• Accessories, Souls, and Powers can produce Unique Effects.
• Armaments, Accessories, and Souls can Invoke…which invokes Powers, which can Strike, Move, Block, and produce Unique Effects.

So basically everything can do basically everything. There’s no separation of concerns whatsoever. From the input side, dice get plugged into everything and also everything wants stamina. It’s a mess.

Now, I think it’s fine if multiple kinds of things can do something. I’m aiming for more baseline complication than RUNE/REAP so that’s inevitable. But for this new thing, I think we can untangle this a bit by using a few of the less obvious cues from RUNE/REAP:

• Limit secondary resource inputs to equipment. Dice should be versatile, other resources should be less so.
• Restrict resource inputs to certain outputs by making them augment or accompany others.
• Be more strict about what kinds of loadout can create certain outputs.

So I’m considering the same kinds/amount of equipment as VHT: 2 weapons, 1 armor, 1 title, and 0-X spells. But let’s see what that looks like now:

Still got a lot going on, but much more distributed and cleaner. Let’s break it down by loadout:

• Armaments input dice (2+ only), can optionally input stamina to add outputs to die results, and output Move, Strike, or Block.
• Outfits input dice (1 only) and have passive effects, and can output Move, Strike, or Block.
• Spells input dice and need to have been prepared in a spell slot prior, which is used up vancian-style afterwards.³ They can only output Move, Strike, or Unique Effect.
• Titles (like Explorer, Warrior, etc - how I’m envisioning this is the way you carry yourself at the start of a day) provide a unique effect or affect resources (health, stamina, spell slots).

Now let’s look from the output side of things:

• Strike and Move come from Weapons, Outfits, and Spells.
• Block comes from Weapons and Outfits only. (Spells might do some defensive-ish things via unique effects but they’re not going to be Block as such.)
• Healing only comes from burning max Stamina and only out of combat.⁴
• Passive resources like max Health, max Stamina, and max Spell Slots are affected only by Titles, not any other loadout piece.

And from those inputs, the main thing is that all of the operative bits - strike, move, block - have to happen through dice. No exceptions. Other things can tweak them, but you have to use dice alongside them. There are intentionally no first-order uses of resources that don’t also go through dice (aside from like, passive stuff).

Now, don’t get too excited. Remember the Binary Star Promise up top. I have several things I do need to finish first, so this one gets to cook on the backburner on low. But I think I’ve got a better plan for this, at least, than I had before.

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