Spent 4 hours on a single rulebook page for my homebrew game

I've been working on a dungeon crawler board game for about 6 months now. Last week I sat down to write the combat rules, thinking it would take maybe an hour tops. Four hours later I was still staring at the same page trying to figure out how flanking works without making it too complicated. The real killer was that I had to scrap the whole first draft because I realized I forgot to account for ranged attacks. Has anyone else spent way too long on what seemed like a simple rule?

2 comments

2 Comments

viola_butler1mo ago

Drafting melee and ranged together is a beast. Did you end up simplifying flanking by just using a basic position check or keeping a direction system?

white.seth1mo ago

Hang on, I think you might be mixing up flanking with facing rules. In my experience with @viola_butler's system, direction based flanking sounds like it's from a more detailed system like D&D or Pathfinder. Most OSR or simple games just check if two allies are on opposite sides of the enemy. That's your basic position check. You don't need to track which way a monster is looking unless you're doing really fiddly grid stuff. I ran a two year campaign with just "are you on the other side of the guy" and it worked fine. Direction tracking sounds like a headache for minimal payoff unless you're doing something super tactical. Your mileage may vary obviously but keep it simple unless your players really love math rocks.