reikhelm/.dev/2026-06-02-combat-system/spec/design.md

Combat System — Design Spec

Status: draft for review · Date: 2026-06-02 · Experiment folder: combat/ (to be created)

A standalone experiment in the reikhelm sandbox. No dependency on reikhelm-core — it only borrows the same conventions (pure deterministic core, serde config, ChaCha8 RNG, headless-first, front-ends as consumers). Lives in its own top-level folder per the repo's one-experiment-per-folder convention.

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1. Thesis

A real-time (tick-based) combat system in the EverQuest / Daggerfall lineage — auto-attack + skills + magic — built on one deliberately unusual idea: a single combined resource pool that replaces separate HP / mana / stamina. Everything you do and everything done to you draws on the same bar. Offense literally spends your survival.

It is a deterministic simulation first, a playable game second. The "feel" is not eyeballed — it is measured across thousands of simulated fights and tuned to target durations and difficulty curves. The engine is pure and headless; a batch sim harness and (later) a real-time visual front-end are both just consumers of it.

The two-axis model (the spine)

Every combatant has one pool, Vigor, with three derived quantities:

Term	Meaning
Vigor (fill)	Current value of the pool. Also = your absorb capacity (see §4).
Vigor Cap (ceiling)	max_vigor − fatigue. The highest your fill can regen to right now.
Fatigue	Accumulated, fight-scoped reduction of the cap. Recovers only out of combat or via recovery abilities.

Every combat verb is a point on two axes — cost to fill and cost to ceiling:

Verb class	Δ fill	Δ ceiling	Example
Offense (skills/spells)	+cost	+cost	kick = (5, 1)
Auto-attack & defensive reactions (block/parry/evade)	0	+small	swing = (0, 1)
Recovery (spells/skills/potions)	+cost	−restore	second wind = (8, −5)
Damage taken	−mitigated	+fatigue_share	—

The entire combat vocabulary is different numbers in that grid. Balancing the game is editing a table. This is both the design elegance and the core requirement (§10–12).

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2. Goals & Non-Goals

Goals

• A combined-pool, mitigation-and-recovery combat model that feels tense and fair.
• Fully data-driven: every number is config; nothing balance-relevant is hardcoded.
• Deterministic and headless: a fight is reproducible from (config, seed, loadouts).
• Instrumented: emits a structured event/metric stream; exports CSV/JSON for analysis.
• Batch-simulatable: run 10⁴–10⁶ fights across matchup/parameter sweeps to tune balance.
• Symmetric: players and monsters run the identical model; only their controller differs.
• Composable abilities: skills and spells are one system built from effect primitives.
• Emergent role identity without classes and without training points.

Non-Goals (this experiment)

• Rendering / animation / art. (A visual front-end comes later, as a consumer.)
• Movement & real positioning. Range is abstracted to a scalar/band for now.
• Loot, XP curves, character creation, networking, persistence.
• The crafting / discovery / reagent economy that produces abilities — separate experiment.
• The progression system that grows competency — separate experiment.

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3. The Resource Model

Vigor, Cap, Fatigue

• vigor (current fill), max_vigor (level/stat-derived constant), fatigue (≥0, starts 0).
• cap = max_vigor − fatigue. vigor is clamped to [0, cap].
• Regen: each tick, vigor += regen_per_tick, clamped to cap. Regen restores fill toward the ceiling only — it never touches fatigue. (Optional config: reduced regen rate while in combat vs. idle.)
• Fatigue ("spend leaves a mark"): any point that leaves the pool generates fatigue. Default fatigue += fatigue_ratio × amount_spent for damage taken and unlabeled spend; abilities may override with an explicit authored fatigue_cost. Fatigue only decreases via recovery abilities (in combat) or rest (out of combat). It does not regen.

Damage in

• An attack's landed damage is a percentage of the target's max_vigor, set by the con curve (§7) and reduced by the mitigation pipeline (§8). Even-con, unarmored ≈ 10%; +5 levels ≈ 30%; −5 levels ≈ 2% (illustrative anchors; the curve is config).
• Applying damage: vigor −= landed; fatigue += fatigue_ratio × landed (a share of every hit becomes permanent-for-the-fight ceiling loss). Then resolve stagger (§4).

The squeeze

You don't lose by emptying your fill once — you lose because attrition grinds your ceiling down, a lower ceiling means a lower fill, and a low fill means the next big hit overruns your capacity and triggers the stagger cascade. Everything points at the same death.

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4. Stagger Cascade (the death model)

There is no instant "vigor = 0 → dead". Capacity = current vigor. A landed hit is compared to capacity at the moment it lands:

Landed hit vs. capacity	Result
hit ≤ vigor	Absorbed normally. vigor −= hit.
vigor < hit < 1.5 × vigor	Dazed / knocked down (temporary status). Regen rate reduced.
hit ≥ 1.5 × vigor	Unconscious. Regen zeroed until recovered.

Once unconscious, regen can't save you and follow-up hits grind you to 0 → dead. The thresholds (1.0×, 1.5×) and the dazed regen penalty are config.

Consequence that makes it sing: spending offense lowers your fill, which lowers your capacity, which raises your stagger risk on the very next hit. "Fire the kick at 60%, eat an add's swing, get staggered" is a real mechanical cascade, not flavor.

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5. Actors & Symmetry

Every combatant is the same Actor — same Vigor/Cap/Fatigue, same stagger cascade, same ability resolution. Variety comes from two independent dials:

• Stat block → archetype. Golem = huge max_vigor, big hits, slow regen, long attack delay. Rat = tiny pool, fast cheap pecks. Same model, different numbers.
• Controller → intent. A pluggable decision layer that emits actions (attack / use ability / wait / recover). The Actor doesn't know who drives it:
  • Player controller — driven by input (interactive front-end) or a scripted policy (sim).
  • AI controllers — v1: swing-on-cooldown. Later: hold-and-punish (wait, watch the target's fill, unload the haymaker exactly when they've spent low to overrun capacity), kite, heal. The AI plays the same timing meta-game the player does.

Controllers are swappable with zero changes to combat math — critical for the sim (scripted policies of varying skill let us measure the gradual→brutal difficulty curve).

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6. Abilities — Unified Skills + Spells

Skills and spells are one thing: an Ability. "Kick" = melee delivery + physical effect + potency. "Fireball" = projectile delivery + fire effect + potency. Both resolve through the same two-axis cost + effect grid.

Composition

An ability is composed from:

• Delivery / shape — self / touch / melee / projectile / beam / aoe(n). Sets targeting and a base cost.
• Effect(s) — one or more, drawn from the effect library (§6.1). Each adds cost.
• Potency — scalar multiplier on effect magnitude and cost.
• Target count — 1..N. Multiplies cost.

cast_cost = f(delivery, Σ effects, potency, targets) → an absolute (fill_cost, fatigue_cost). Higher potency / more effects / more targets ⇒ more expensive. The 6-target, potency-10 AoE "cosmic nuke" costs ~90% of a full bar — leaving you at ~10%, one swing from the cascade. Power is paid in vulnerability.

Cost is absolute; pay-at-start

• Affordability gate: you cannot begin an ability whose fill_cost > current vigor. Heavy abilities are gated behind a healthy bar; as your ceiling grinds down over a fight, you progressively lose access to your big hitters.
• Pay at cast-start; fizzle or interruption = paid for nothing. One rule covers both fizzle risk (§9) and getting staggered mid-cast: you spent the cost and the ability never fired.

Cast time

• The only structural axis separating "skill" from "spell": skills are mostly instant; spells have a wind-up (cast time in ticks) during which you are exposed and interruptible. Cast time is per-ability config.

6.1 Effect library (both axes)

Effects target either fill or ceiling — and the ceiling-attacking ones are the most on-thesis content the system can have:

• Fill damage — % of target max_vigor (con + mitigation applied).
• Ceiling damage / curse — drains target fatigue directly (attacks the real life total).
• Regen sabotage — reduces target regen for a duration.
• Fatigue amplification — raises target's fatigue-per-spend for a duration.
• DoT / HoT — fill drain / restore over ticks.
• Mitigation debuff / buff — feeds the mitigation pipeline (§8).
• Recovery — −fatigue (raises ceiling) at a +fill cost; the inverse verb.

Effect types are a small enum/registry; adding one is a library entry, not an engine change.

6.2 Defensive abilities

Block / parry / evade are abilities with (0 fill, +fatigue) and a brief active window: incoming hits landing during the window are mitigated/negated (they feed the §8 pipeline). They cost endurance, never your guard. (Reactive timing vs. the attacker's wind-up is the defensive counterpart to timing your offense — see Designed-For §14.)

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7. The Con Curve (shared level-delta mapping)

A single config-driven curve maps level delta to a magnitude multiplier, reused in both directions:

• Incoming damage %: delta = attacker_level − defender_level → base damage % of pool.
• Outgoing effect resist/effectiveness: delta = caster_effective_level − target_level (caster_effective_level folds in competency, §9) → fraction of the effect that lands.

Anchors (config, illustrative): even-con baseline; ≈3× at +5; ≈0.2× at −5; roughly monotonic. Represented as a parametric function or a small lookup table — TBD in tuning, but it is one curve doing double duty.

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8. Mitigation Pipeline

All "how much of this hit actually lands" reduction flows through one ordered pipeline so new sources are additive contributors, never reworks:

• Armor — passive attrition reduction (shrinks the damage %). Does not protect against stagger; it just makes you bleed fill slower so you stay in the safe band longer.
• Con — the level-delta curve (§7).
• Active defenses — block/parry/evade windows (§6.2).
• Stances (designed-for) — toggled mitigation trades.
• Buffs/debuffs — temporary contributors from effects.

Player skill = which abilities and when, not gear stat-checks. Armor and con set the backdrop; timing decides the fight.

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9. Progression & Identity

Competency (soft gates)

Each Actor has a competency value per school (e.g., Invocation, Fire). Competency is mostly not a hard cast wall; it drives two independent checks:

• Fizzle — "does it go off?" f(competency, ability difficulty), where difficulty is driven by the same factors as cost (potency, #effects, #targets). Low competency vs. high difficulty ⇒ frequent fizzle (and per §6, a fizzle means you paid for nothing).
• Resist / effectiveness — "how much lands?" the con curve (§7) with caster competency folded into effective level. Even a sneaked-off potency-10 cast gets shrugged off by an over-con target.

A few hard school gates are allowed for structure (e.g., a school locked until competency ≥ X).

Two independent brakes on power

• Cost gates affordability (can you pay it?).
• Competency gates reliability + effectiveness (will it fire, will it land?).

You cannot craft a god-spell at level 1 and skip the game: you'll mostly fizzle, and what lands is resisted to a trickle. Progression is earned, not bought.

No classes, no training points — three-layer emergent identity

1. Competency = who you are over time. Your per-school profile is your identity; earned by use, never allocated.
2. Loadout / memorization = who you are this fight. Your known set can be large, but you commit a limited slotted set per encounter (re-slot only on rest / out of combat). Even an omni-competent veteran must choose a role for this pull — breadth of knowledge ≠ breadth of power.
3. Shared pool = who you are this second. One bar means you can't be nuker and healer at once; the resource economy forces a moment-to-moment role with no extra rules.

Pure classes are rigid and fight the composable model; pure à-la-carte waters down because everyone converges on one optimal kit. The loadout commitment + competency lag keep roles sharp with zero class definitions and zero skill points.

Optional knob (ship OFF): gentle competency atrophy — unused schools drift toward a floor — as a firmer long-term brake if veterans start homogenizing.

Seam

Combat consumes competency values and emits "used successfully" events. How competency grows (use-based skill-ups, etc.) is a separate progression experiment. We build the hook, not the leveling curve.

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10. Time Model & Determinism

• Fixed tick (default 10 ticks/s, config). Every duration — attack delay, cast time, regen, status durations, active windows — is expressed in ticks. Headless: ticks advance as fast as the CPU allows. Real-time front-end: ticks advance on a wall clock.
• Determinism: seeded ChaCha8 RNG with per-roll sub-streams (mirrors reikhelm-core), so tweaking one parameter doesn't reshuffle unrelated rolls. A fight = (config, seed, loadout_A, loadout_B) → a reproducible outcome + full event log. This reproducibility is what makes the analysis valid: change one knob, observe the isolated delta.

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11. Configuration — the "table"

A single serde-(de)serializable CombatConfig holds all tunables, loadable from JSON. Categories:

• Tick rate; regen rates (idle vs in-combat); dazed regen penalty.
• fatigue_ratio; stagger band thresholds.
• Con curve (parameters or table).
• Mitigation: armor tiers, stance values.
• Cost formula coefficients (delivery base costs, per-effect cost, potency scaling, per-target multiplier); auto-attack (0, small) default.
• Fizzle & resist curve parameters.
• Actor stat blocks & ability/effect library definitions (data, not code).

Nothing balance-relevant is hardcoded. Editing config is the primary balancing act; structural rule changes are the only thing requiring a recompile.

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12. Instrumentation, Metrics & Balancing

Event stream

The engine emits a structured event per meaningful tick: {tick, actor, action, fill_before, fill_after, ceiling, fatigue, stagger_state, fizzle?, target, landed, outcome?}. A recorder rolls events into per-fight summary metrics.

Per-fight metrics (export to CSV/JSON)

Time-to-resolution (ticks & seconds); outcome (win/loss/draw/timeout); #staggers, #dazes, #unconscious; #fizzles; total fill damage dealt/taken; total ceiling damage; min fill reached; ceiling-decay curve; near-death recoveries; effective DPS; vigor/ceiling time series (optional, sampled).

Batch harness & "feel" as acceptance criteria

A harness runs N fights across a matchup/parameter sweep (level-delta × armor tier × loadout × controller-skill) and exports the aggregate. The user's "feel" failure modes become measurable guardrails:

• "slow player knocked every 2s quits" → stagger-frequency ceiling: from a full bar, an even-con opponent must not stagger-lock you in under N hits.
• "gradual but scales to brutally difficult" → a target time-to-kill curve by con-tier: under-con trivial, even-con a satisfying ~X-second fight, +5 winnable only with skilled play, +8 lethal. Sweep parameters until the curve matches the intended shape.

Analysis layer

A Python package (combat/analysis/, own .venv) consumes the exported CSV/JSON via pandas: sweep orchestration, difficulty-curve plots, parameter search toward target durations.

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13. Architecture & Layout

combat/                      # own Cargo workspace — independent of root reikhelm workspace
  Cargo.toml                 # [workspace] so the parent workspace never absorbs it
  combat-core/               # pure deterministic engine: Actor, Ability, tick loop, RNG, events
                             #   no I/O, no rendering, no real-time. The single source of truth.
  combat-sim/                # binary: load config + scenarios, run batch sweeps,
                             #   record metrics, export CSV/JSON
  analysis/                  # Python: pandas/plots over exported data (own .venv, own .gitignore)
  configs/                   # JSON configs / sane defaults
  README.md
  # (later) combat-wasm/ + a web playable, mirroring the reikhelm-web pattern

• Decoupling: root Cargo.toml uses explicit members (no globs), and combat/Cargo.toml declares its own [workspace], so combat/ is a self-contained experiment that neither pollutes nor depends on the existing crates.
• Deps (to be created): combat-core → rand_chacha = "0.10", serde = { "1", features = ["derive"] }; combat-sim → serde_json, plus a CSV writer (e.g. csv). Edition 2021, Rust 1.96.
• gitignore additions: combat/target/, combat/analysis/.venv/, exported data (e.g. combat/**/out/, *.csv under combat output dirs).

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14. Scope — v1 Vertical Slice vs. Designed-For

The full vision above is the design. To find the fun before building all of it, v1 proves the core loop and the balancing capability — which, for a data-first build, means the headless sim matters more than visuals.

v1 vertical slice (build this first):

• combat-core: Actor + Vigor/Cap/Fatigue + stagger cascade + regen + mitigation (armor + con) + fixed-tick loop + seeded RNG + event emission.
• 3–4 hardcoded abilities (auto-attack, a cheap skill, a heavy skill, a recovery) — not the composer yet; just enough to exercise the two-axis grid.
• One dumb-AI controller (swing-on-cooldown) + a scripted player policy.
• combat-sim: run a matchup sweep, export per-fight metrics CSV.
• analysis: a first notebook plotting TTK and stagger-frequency by con-tier.
• Success = the duration/difficulty curves are tunable via config to the intended shape. If managing one pool against the stagger cascade is tense in the data, we layer the rest on.

Designed-for / explicitly deferred (nothing dropped):

• The ability composer + data-driven effect library (v1 hardcodes; the model is built so this slots in).
• Competency / fizzle / resist as data-driven progression inputs.
• Loadout / memorization mechanic.
• Telegraphs & reactive defense (block/parry/evade timed vs. wind-up) — nearly free once abilities have cast-time windows.
• Stances (mitigation knob), ceiling-attacking effect content, DoT/HoT/buff/debuff breadth.
• WASM build + real-time visual playable (another consumer of combat-core).
• Crafting / discovery / reagents (separate experiment) and competency advancement (separate experiment) — combat exposes the seams.
• Smarter AI controllers (hold-and-punish, kite, heal).

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15. Open Questions / Risks

• Con curve shape is the balance lever the whole feel rides on; it will need real sweep data to settle. Start parametric, validate against target curves.
• Regen vs. drain vs. spend rates must be co-tuned, or even-con fights are either un-loseable (regen dominates) or stagger-locked (drain dominates). The sim exists precisely to find this balance; treat default numbers as placeholders.
• Fizzle-cost severity: pay-at-start + fizzle-for-nothing is brutal by design; verify it doesn't make low-competency casting never worth attempting (which would stall progression).
• Scripted "player skill" policies for the sim are themselves a modeling choice — the difficulty curve is only as meaningful as the policies are representative. Document the policies used for any published balance numbers.