It became very clear during the first chapter of Chrono Bolt that I named certain mechanics poorly. I was trying to follow the naming conventions in Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross, but the level of adherence was a mistake.

The mechanics in video games are one step removed so some confusing terminology isn’t a big problem. In a roleplaying system confusion over [Physical damage type] vs [physical damage] or [Attack action] vs [attack] starts to cause some real issues. As a Game Master, I really want players to be confident in their understanding of the system and able to clearly understand what they can do.

This is why Pathfinder Second Edition did away with Attack as a name for a mechanic. It gets confusing. I tried to stay a bit too true to the Chrono naming conventions and that was a mistake, so I’m changing the following.

• Attack action → Strike action: I’ve never liked ‘Strike’ as a name but it works and it’s familiar to most of the players due to Pathfinder 2 so might as well.
• Mental → Elemental: I changed ‘Magic’ to ‘Mental’ earlier to avoid some confusion but, as I’ve thought about, Elemental is more true to the games.
• Mental Defense → Elemental Defense: Same as above. Elemental more accurately captures the role of the mechanic.
• Physical damage → Nonelemental damage: There was understandable confusion over the Physical damage type, physical damage, and non-aligned damage. Shifting to Nonelemental damage clarifies things.

I’m not sharing the Gamemaster rules and resources until after the first game finishes for obvious reasons. Of course I don’t want the players to have access to the bestiary but, more so, I’m still working through the math and want to keep formula edits behind the curtain.

But I wanted to share the most exciting tab in the Gamemaster Spreadsheet – Action Resolution. This is where all of the data from the rest of the spreadsheet is pulled together to determine the results of actions.

On the left, we have the player character primary stats pulled over from the Player Data tab.

On the right, we have the enemy stats (notice that they’re much simpler) from the specific Era’s NPC tab. I’m not linking to that data at this point – because there are a lot of NPCs – but just copying and pasting the relevant data into the right (which is why I didn’t include it in the screenshot).

And in the center are the formulas including random number generation. To generate new numbers I just need to click on the player character dropdown.

This is pretty basic currently but I plan to add more functionality as we go. It would be cool, for instance, to add conditionally formatting so that evasion displayed ‘Miss‘, ‘Hit‘, or ‘Critical‘ instead of the number. Then, of course, I could add If statements to the damage formula to show 0s on a miss and double damage on a critical.

This central column is also going to get very cluttered as Techs begin to get added below.

In play, this set-up is actually faster than dice for tabletop. Much faster. But the downside is that the Game Master has to enter all the unique formulas before play.

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Chrono Trigger has surprisingly complicated damage formulas that, often, use the number 256. This was probably due to a limitation of the SNES chipset but it makes for some interesting math.

Something I love about using a spreadsheet for Action Resolution, instead of dice, is that it can actually emulate weird and complex game math. I’ll be nerding out about how this plays into the basic Attack formulas in future posts.