underside dev diary #10: statless in seattle, pt.5

i anticipate being very busy over the next couple of weeks: as such, this dev diary and the two following it will be very brief. this one's about the combat skills and the thought that went into picking them. these are the skills: 

the #1 priority going into this (and all of the skills, and designing approaches) is to make sure that every character, no matter how they were built or what power they ended up with, would have some inroad to contributing in every situation. combat skills occupy a weird space in this game, where unlike most superhero games, they're not something you're really meant to take if your power already gives you a combat option. they're here to supplement that, to give a long-range fire-breather a short-ranged brawling option with a regular weapon, or to make sure that the squishy precog at least knows how to use a gun.

where a lot of games (and a few earlier drafts of this one, including its predecessor capes in the dark) will have several combat skills to try and differentiate different types of fighting (the elegant, careful fencer with a precise technique vs. the brute force bare-knuck boxer), the A/V system means Approaches do all the heavy lifting for us here, at least to the level of abstraction we're interested in reaching. the mechanical difference between gracefully sweeping someone's legs out from under them with a practiced taekwondo maneuver and ramming the full force of your body weight into them is that one is an option for your Patient or Ruthless character while the other works well for your Aggressive or Wild character. because ultimately while underside cares a lot about cool cape fights, it ultiamtely cares about them as characterization more than as anything else.