ABSTRACT
Combat should make the player feel like they are empowered, capable of making winning decisions. To make players feel empowered, it’s necessary for the game to have one or more counters for every action an enemy can take. Once the combat is over, there needs to be a focus on celebration which adds a significant amount to how the player feels independent of how good the action combat loop is. The constraints of combat form the boundaries of dramatic combat encounters and work in concert with our pillars of combat in terms of making decisions about what combat should be. Time in an encounter is as important as the time outside of the encounter in two separate ways, all of which, if implemented improperly, can cause players to accuse a game of being unbalanced. The two purposes of out-of-combat time are anticipation (building up to the next combat) and recovery (release after the previous combat).
