Battle System FAQ

What?

Just to cover the basics, we live in a pokemon-like society, but with sentient robots called “mons” instead of animals. Wild mons (ones that live out in the wilderness beyond the enclave city most of the game is run within) are able to reproduce. uMon (and other big corporations) capture these wild mons, sterilize them, then modify them to serve as slaves. It should be noted that uMon CLAIMS to be building these mons from scratch but it's a total lie. These slaves are classified in general groups per their function as utility (mons tasked with constructions and maintenance of society and its people), pet (self-explanatory), etc.

Sportmons, specifically, are modified to kill each other in entertaining ways.

How are fights organized?

There are two kinds of tournaments:

1. Sanctioned – These follow a strict set of rules set by a corporation (usually uMon) that cover what kinds of mons can fight (usually only the latest to help them bring up demand), how winners are determined, what kinds of tactics are allowed, etc. We don’t know anything about these, really, as they never come up.

2. Nonsanctioned – These tournaments have few, if any, rules. You want to use an ancient mon from before the corporations existed? Sure. You want to use a “mon” that’s essentially a giant rock with a mon brain encased inside it? Go for it. You want to just “fight” with the cheapest mon you can find and then just give it a gun or a bomb? No problem! You know, so long as no humans get hurt. In many cases, for Nonsactioned tournaments, its up to the competitors to decide what rules they want to fight by and what kinds of “mons” they want to fight with, so it’s left entirely up to them to decide what makes a fair fight. They are entirely their own referees. The only consequences to “cheating” is the risk that nobody will want to fight your team anymore if you do it too often.

How are fights won?

Mons have three numbers in their stat column that you need to keep in the positives:

1. Their health. Obviously, if they lose it all, they faint or die.
2. Their morale. If they lose it all, they become unresponsive.
3. Their energy. If they lose it all, they collapse.

The first two stats are depleted by damage (physical, elemental, or morale, which are explained below) and the last is depleted through the mons use of actions. These include entering battle, leaving it, attacking, defending, even just standing around has an energy cost. Post-fight all energy and morale is restored.

What are the damage types?

There are three types starting with the easiest to explain and working towards the hardest:

1. Morale damage – These drain morale points for a mon and represent their willingness to fight. These can be drained or boosted by attacks but they also change “organically”, raising when an enemy mon goes down and decreasing when an allied one goes down (I assume Bryce will eventually integrate additional events that can affect the stat during battle). Each mon has a will that is used to calculate damage for these kinds of attacks. If the attacker has a high will stat and the defender has a low one then extra morale damage will be done. If vice versa the defender could take minimal morale damage or, in some cases, none at all.
2. Physical damage. This is physical trauma being inflicted on a mon. Piercing, slashing, crushing, burning trauma with no theatrics. Each mon has a physical attack stat (representing their strength, bulk, the sharpness of their weapons, etc.) and a physical defense stat (representing the thickness of their armor and ability to shrug off physical blows). Most attacks have some degree of physical damage and elemental damage, IE a cursed sword both curses (elemental) and cuts (physical). Chance to hit with these attacks is governed by Dexterity, though chance to dodge said attacks is governed by Agility (as opposed to using the same stat like with Will attacks).

3. Elemental damage. Basically this is any damage that isn’t covered above. Elements come in 16 different flavors, each of which is weak (IE takes double damage) to three types, strong (IE takes half damage) to three types, and takes a tenth of the damage from their own element. Sportmons can be any element or set of elements. More info on that here: https://rpg.rrgv.org/wiki/NSC/Elemental Damage is governed by elemental attack and defense like with Physical damage above. Chance to hit can be based on Dexterity or Will depending on the type of attack.

What does “elemental damage” and “morale damage” look like?

Sportmons are full of nanobots that are programmed to make elemental damage have the predicted effects. Take the move “Acid Sap”, for example. The actual attack is just colored water being sprayed at the opponent (more cost-effective than real acid that way), but upon getting hit the defender’s nanobots WILL start dissolving their flesh to make the damage real. Ice damage will make the defender’s nanobots form ice crystals under its skin, lightening damage will make them intentionally short out and blow, etc. All elemental damage results in real harm caused by a sportmon's internal nanobots.

Morale damage results in the victim sportmon’s brain get flooded with sad-chemicals when demoralized so that they look convincingly-depressed.

Non-sportmons don’t have nanobots primed to cause them real physical harm as a result of elemental attacks. As a result their elemental resistance is essentially infinite. They can similarly ignore morale attacks since, again, their system isn’t configured to turn on them. This makes them overpowered and only allowed in nonsanctioned competitions. In truth, the physical damage an attack can do refers to how much damage a non-sportsmon would take from it, even if the attack seems elemental in origin (for instance, fireball can deal a lot of physical damage even though it might seem like it's entirely elemental). Elemental damage is entirely the component of any attack that a non-sportsmon could ignore.

How do you heal?

I'm not sure.

Sportmons' internal systems will heal them on their own so long as those systems, themselves, aren't sufficiently-damaged to prevent them from doing so. In those cases the mons can be put in tanks. Mons can eat pretty much anything to create the components they need to heal but uMon sells "mon vitamins" that can be used in place of just eating garbage.

There's a price associated with ANY amount of healing, though, even though I don't follow why, particularly since minor damage can usually be restored by a mon's internal storage of replacement components. Also a skilled hacker can reset some elemental damage based on whether a sportmon's internal systems have had enough time to make all the experienced damage "real", though why it takes time for the harm to come about isn't fully clear since the sportmon's system is flooded with these bots and they seem to be very efficient at causing harm to their host mon.

I don't feel like this whole mechanic is very well defined within the system.

What happens when mons get to 0% health?

The further below 0% HP the mon goes the greater the random chance that they will die. If the cause of death is physical damage then this is self-explanatory as the attack that killed them will have broken their head open, torn them into pieces, crushed them into a silicone pancake, etc.

In the interest of being "fair", though, elemental damage can cause mon death as well. If a sportmon goes far-enough into negative HP as a result of, say, the Holy attack "Forbidden Word", then their nanobots will tear them apart from the inside. A skilled hacker than prevent this from happening, though.

What determines the order of attacks in a turn?

Mons attack in order of descending agility scores. Some attacks are "priority" attacks, which means they go first no matter what (unless there are multiple priority attacks, in which case agility applies again). There are also some actions, like switching in/out mons, which are handled as a kind of "super priority" to prevent even priority moves from interrupting them.

What is a combo move?

Combo moves are moves are ones that don't take up a turn to use, as in a mon can use a combo move AND a normal move/attack on the same turn. Or two combo moves and a normal move. Or three or four or five or six. You could, in fact, have nothing but combo moves and do all of them every turn.

What are intrinsics?

Some sportmons have something called an "intrinsic". It's just something that makes them unique... kinda. All given mons of a type have the same intrinsic and multiple mon types can have the same one. What the intrinsic does varies: https://rpg.rrgv.org/wiki/NSC/Mon%20Intrinsics

It's just one more mechanic to keep in mind during fights.