One of the developers at Flying Lab Software, DrewC, has provided the community with part one of his developer log about Swashbuckling. In this first part of the developer log, he provides us with a look into the different combat pools; health, balance, and initiative. DrewC also talks about the different defenses you have while fighting. Here are a few excerpts from the log...

...When we designed the Swashbuckling System, we decided to make the basic defenses automatic. We feel there is too much uncertainty with regard to player connection speeds and reaction times to try and create a system where players are responsible for blocking every incoming blow. As a result, we give all characters a chance to first Parry, then Block, and finally to Dodge each incoming attack. Each of these defense types is equally effective in that they reduce the damage of an incoming attack to 0; however, they have secondary effects which make them significantly different..

...Combat Pools are an abstract representation of your character’s status. The first, and most critical, combat Pool is Health. Your character’s Health is an abstraction of how much of a beating he can take and keep on fighting. It functions like hit points do in most games: as long as you have some left you’re ok. When your character reaches 0 he’s defeated; until that point he’s 100% combat effective. We talked about more complicated systems of declining effectiveness as you take damage, but ultimately decided that this was not an interesting place in the system to add complications...

Want to know more? Check out the entire developer log here!