Ohoy Kadungganan! And welcome to all the new people that now have access to the game of martial arts fantasy!

Today marks a new chapter in Gubat Banwa’s lifespan: a shift of gameplay for a number of important game design decisions. It is with great, great apprehension that I went down this route, as of course I had been spending an entire year trying to sharpen, polish, and innovate on the design space of the dice pool combat of Gubat Banwa. Unfortunately, all of the effort has only lead to esoteric probabilities, difficult to grok math, and a much harder space to create content in—all detrimental to the “ballistic lightning fast tactical combat” that the mechanics attempts to achieve. Without clearer probabilities and math, it is more difficult to make decisions, and the choices you make don’t feel impactful. The dice pool did not feel ballistic nor kinetic at all—instead it felt unwieldy and like fighting with wet towels.

On lower levels, this didn’t matter too much—and truly, a lot of games work just fine on lower levels. Unfortunately, a lot of higher level play in this iteration of Gubat Banwa was straight up frustrating, with the math of the dice pools breaking into 0s or 1 net hits in total, robbing the game of all of its exciting back and forth. I’d walked straight back into D&D 4e’s trap.

So where to go from here?

The past few versions of the game, the one I was so confident that I’d branded it First Edition, eventually broke down. The game felt good because I was running it at Legend 0. Don’t do that—even if statistically most games won’t get past the lower rungs of Legend, you make for a mathematically broken game that is going to be shaky at best, and unplayable at worst.

Why so much stress over the mathematics of the game? For this genre of game, it’s make or break. If we want to facilitate a good time between players, who want to flex their tactical capabilities and/or their Kadungganan’s builds (or how cool their enemy team is in the Umalagad’s perspective), it must be done with the least amount of GM fiat as possible. This is for many reasons, but the top two reasons are playfeel and reducing social friction. 

A game of violence should be working.

So what changed?

Here’s how it goes down:

Dice Pools Redux

The funny thing is this: dice pools technically haven’t gone away. Most of your attacks still have you building a pool of dice, especially at higher levels, representing multiple attacks or stronger hits. Just like the ludonarrative vehicle of the past dice pool.

However, dice are now mostly single dice at their base. A Mangangayaw rolls their d8 + their FER for an inflict violence, meaning they roll the dice and then add their stat. The same feel still goes: it’s all Damage Rolls. Defenses reduce final damage. You can still parry a nuke.

Improved Violence Mechanics

Merit and Demerit are ways of building dice pools. Damage can be raised by dice. A single die can be Evaded. Clearer rules for ranges (range bands of X~Y are back!) New forced movement type: Throw. Clearer rules for verticality and area pattern.

Why Change Bravery and Faith? 

These are holdovers as Final Fantasy Tactics references. It worked in FFT: Magic in FFT was intrinsically connected to your own Faith and the target’s faith. If you had no Faith at all, you would suffer no magic damage or status effects. This is not the case for Gubat Banwa. Additionally, most games I’ve run here in the PH have had more than once people that went “Oh, I’m playing a Lunar Warrior faithful to Goddess but my Faith is at 0.” We want to reduce that friction as much as possible; we want the mechanics to tell the lore. Ferocity works for the more brutal feel of Gubat Banwa, and Spirit works to signify the strength of one’s spirit and/or their sensitivity to the world of souls.

Why Change HP?

Due to the change in game-feel of Attacks always whittling down HP, HP being 1-for-1 blows for hits didn’t jive well anymore. Taking a page from Sekiro: HP is now Posture (POS), representing your composure, focus, vigor, and constitution. As it is whittled down, you are ever more open to being fully wounded—and when you hit 0 Posture, you suffer a Wound! You still die at 5 Wounds. Posture heals completely, but Wounds need true Downtime.

Posture the defense is now renamed PARRY [PAR], to describe deflecting, avoiding blows, reducing attack’s effectivity. Now with these words in place, the fiction of kinetic exchange of blows is retained. The game’s wuxia-feel is expounded upon, as you become a true martial hero cutting through unbeatable odds, with a defense that whittles down as you get tired over the course of a fight.

Techniques Revamped

Techniques no longer have the three-beat structure to them. The major reason is that designing them was a bit of a design black hole—it was a lot of effort for almost nothing important in return. They’d become a bit of an illusion of choice—often times they didn’t really add anything to the game. 3 Beat Techniques became a trap option, especially in the game where movement is meant to be so important. Lastly and worst of all: a lot of the time the 3 Beat Structure led to too-similar techniques that became muddled and too the same. There’s only so much you could do! The costing also became almost impossible. 

3 Beats in general should mean 3 actions—that’s how we keep the ballistic martial arts feel. Additionally, you only get 1 Technique per Legend—two techniques led to exponential increase in options and complexity. Legend 1 immediately getting an Enlightenment is way too large of a complexity leap. While I’m able to handle it, a lot of others—especially those that love tactics games but can still get overwhelmed by options—cannot. 

To offset this, there are no longer NO SLOTS. All Techniques you get you can use. A lot of playtesting has gone into the new Techniques. The outcome? Even at Legend 9, with 9 Techniques, almost all of the Techniques were used. Techniques now became part of a ballistic combination instead of a weird timing-game.

Anting Revamped

You can now get up to 6 Anting, limited to half your Legend rounded up. There are now 50 Anting in the Core Rulebook. They’re split into the 5 Styles, 10 each, though you’re not obligated to wear Anting of your Style, they’re there for easier navigation. Go wild.

Scaling

Scaling is linear now—you gain +1 to a Prowess every Legend. You add your Legend to all your Attacks, Defenses, and your HP—at Legend 6, with a maxed out Ferocity, you could be making a melee attack that does d8+14 (FER 8 + Legend 6) DMG. That’s an average of 18.5. This is against the usual Defense of a Raider, who at that point would have 9 POS, bringing the average damage down to 9.5 per Attack—perfectly aligning with the expected number of attacks needed to take down an opponent (4 to 5).

Most bonuses and penalties are squished down to Merit and Demerit—Merit lets you add another die and take the highest roll, while Demerit makes you take the lowest. You can take up 3 Merit or Demerit, and they cancel each other out. You don’t track a bunch of +1ds or -1ds anymore, but just Merit and Demerit. Getting Demerit also increases the chance of your attack getting EVADED, the enemies’ EVD stat. 

Even at higher levels, the fight retains the same amount of tension. In general, you can trust the game of the math even more now.

Revamped Enemies

Enemies now have a base set of stats, and then you simply add their Legend to their Prowesses and HPs to bring them up to the Legend of the Kadungganan. This makes it much easier to quickly toss up enemies on the fly, and easier to make homebrewed enemies!

Hordes and Servants

New Enemy Templates: Servants for the minion fantasy of cutting down swathes of minor warriors, and hordes to fulfill almost Dynasty Warriors esque levels of wuxia, cutting through crowds of meager enemies!

Revamped Skill Dice

The new form of skill checks, Skill Casts, have you rolling a d12 + Skill vs 4d8, which is based off of the luknit divination rite—still in practice today among mamamalad in the Philippines! This is a much quicker and more flavorful way of creating a tense skill check system that works great even for Solo Play! The practice of rolling 4d8 luknit dice carry over to Violence as an interesting sort of “initiative” roll. Check out the PDF!

Revamped Disciplines

Disciplines haven’t actually really changed. The main changes come in the modifications of their Discipline Philosophies to be able to generate and spend Thunderbolts outside of your turn. In this way, you’re always playing, even when it isn’t your riff. Additionally, the math is still in general bombastic and weighted against the Kadungganan, so you still need Thunderbolts to be effective. You can start fights with more Thunderbolts… if you’re dramatic enough.

What’s Next

That’s the brunt of the major changes for now. Miniature changes are there but are all implemented for a tighter experience. Hopefully you welcome this change with open arms—it is done with a full force of 4 years of painful development for the game. A lot of the changes have been done informed full by what had transpired during the year of First Edition. This is our last chance to fix everything before it comes out in print and we cannot put out a major overhaul like this anymore. We’ve stamped out almost every part of the game that was detrimental to our design philosophies—and we were only able to do this because of the larger player base that we’ve accrued and the amazing feedback from people who believe in this game.

The text of the game is going to be heading off to our editor now but we have now until around the end of March or so to playtest and fuck with the game, find out more weirdo interactions and missed clarifications and weird playfeels during the game, which we can then apply before the game goes into its final layout, which I'm very excited for. So playing the game is going to be our major goal.

I'll be taking a break from designing GB (and hopefully going to run and play it) for now (after converting all the Patreon stuff!) but I will be beginning to start work on Flowers Over Dalumat (which I'm excited for) and perhaps finally finish Princess Murders The Hero's next update. 

Additionally, I might be able to work on the Third-Party License (taking inspiration from Lancer's take on it) for the new rules so that it's official and all that.

Finally, Backerkit is going live around January, get hype!

That's all for now. Thank you everyone so much. We're on track to glory! Have a good holidays!