Odd Gods Interview

Originally announced back in 2017, Odd Gods is a curious time-travel RPG that’s sometimes described as “Bill and Ted meets Dungeons and Dragons.” And according to this recent Turn Based Lovers interview with the game’s lead designer Gil Maclean, right now the game is heading towards a playable demo. Apart from that, the interview touches on the game’s inspirations, tells us a bit about the studio making it, and provides an overview of the combat system. Here’s something to get you started and you take things from there:

4th Turn) Speaking of gameplay. Can you explain the combats mechanics?

Odd Gods uses a (mostly) deterministic simultaneous turn-based combat system on a grid. Almost like a party & turn-based Dark Souls where everyone moves at the same time.

Each turn takes about 3 seconds, or ‘ticks’. A dagger thrust takes 1 tick. An aimed musket shot: 2 ticks. Reloading a sidearm is 3 ticks. An evasive manoeuvre (like diving into cover or feinting) might take 1 or two ticks, depending on the ability. You could see an enemy preparing to split your head with an axe – and ready a parry ability instead. Ditto, you can intercept enemies – say, an enemy is moving to cover, you can ‘lead’ the target if you can guess where they’ll be when your attack lands, or (my favourite) push an opponent into an enemy’s line of fire, or trip an attacker en route to flank one of your party members.

The combat resolves in real-time – as opposed to waiting for (forever) 3 enemy fighters to move 3 metres forward, one at a time, everyone moves and attacks simultaneously. Based upon how well you can understand the battlefield & your opponents intentions, you plan your party’s turns, preview the possible results and confirm your orders. If you’re skilled enough, and close enough, you can get more information about an enemy’s upcoming action – what direction they’re heading, what kind of attack they’re going to make, etc.

There’s no RNG – no percent chance to hit. You’re not rolling numbers to check against a spreadsheet – you’re moving and commanding units. Our combat system is based on choice & consequence, as opposed to reductive skill checks. There’s a lot of advantages to this: no level scaling, no HP sponges, and so on. It’s a bit like a more turn-based approach to Frozen Synapse, or Laser Squad (or a more accessible Knights of Legend system). There’s not a lot there like it, but you could say that a lot of early menu-based combat RPGs (looking at you, Bard’s Tale) were same phase, with everyone rolling at once. We just take the rolling out of it, and give you the ability to move and attack etc in the game world. I’d call out Neo Scavenger and Copper Dreams as having systems that are a bit like cousins of Odd Gods in that way.