Hello! And welcome to the first of many DAWN based Substack posts, each one analyzing some aspect of the game and hoping to meaningfully expand on it.
For this post, I’ll be looking at the “Archetypes” of DAWN, how I chose to design them, what they each represent, and how I could design more Archetypes that don’t tread on the toes of the existing 6.
For the sake of total coverage, the 6 Archetypes are as follows:
The Powerhouse
Techniques effective in sustained fights. Often requires a high Body Attribute for Attacks, or Talent if you want to be a little more frail and fast.
The Vagabond
Techniques effective at defeating single targets. Often requires a high Talent to get into and escape skirmishes.
The Bulwark
Techniques effective at tanking for a team. Can build for almost any Attribute, as all provide an option to survive longer, but Body is the most common.
The Altruist
Techniques that mainly benefit your allies. As many of these Techniques don’t need to deal damage, Mind is often your best Attribute.
The Disruptor
Techniques that restrict, metaphorically or literally. As many of these Techniques trigger their controlling effects when Casting, they value a high Spirit Attribute.
The Ruiner
Techniques with high impact and cost. Almost all of these Techniques give you high damage setups for Spirit Finishers, Spirit is a must.
Going Deeper
These are the descriptions as said in the book, and though they communicate the basics, they do not go into the details that I’m interested in covering here.
After some thought, I believe that each of the Archetypes and the cores of their design can be defined in three categories:
their effect.
their pace.
and their vibes.
Effect
This is the most important and obvious aspect of an Archetype when it comes to designing their Techniques. It is the intended result of actions taken with the Archetype and their Techniques, as well as the keywords that are most common among them and the things that synergize between them.
Pace
What are their highest and lowest points in a combat, how long do they take to get to that high point, and how long do they need to wait before repeating that high turn.
Vibes
What fiction is the Archetype meant to evoke, what does it take its inspiration from, and what do its sub-archetypes and synergies represent for a character who takes them.
The Powerhouse
Effect: Highly durable with consistent attacks. Often interacts with: taking Wounds, taking effects, Skirmishes, AOE attacks, and sustain effects.
Pace: As stated above, they are consistent, mostly being equally powerful from their first turn to their last, if they take wounds as part of their build they may get slightly weaker as the battle goes on.
Vibes: Warriors, Berserkers, and Fighters of classic fantasy fiction and the blunt-and-strong protagonists of Shōnen. Their mechanics are meant to make you feel stable and reliable, a force of nature that your allies can always rely on to do your job.
The Vagabond
Effect: Focused and quick fighters. Often interacts with: Speed, non-standard movement, turning Utility Actions into damage, and avoiding targeting.
Pace: Vagabonds often require at least one turn of setup, they may mark their enemy with a Technique’s specific effect, hide to prepare an assassination, or breath to set up a specific stance. In any case, their prep rarely takes longer than a Turn and isn’t incredibly complex, but prep is required none-the-less.
Vibes: Assassins, Daredevils, and Myrmidons of classic fantasy and the ever-serious Lancers of Shōnen. Their mechanics are meant to make players feel untouchable and free from the common movement restrictions other players face.
The Bulwark
Effect: Durability that’s meant to sustain their teammates. Often interacts with: Armor, Punish Attacks, Taunt, Launch, and area coverage.
Pace: Though the Bulwark is mostly flat, not relying on their ability to deal damage in bursts, they do become more powerful as the game goes on, due to their ability to respond to and partially mitigate enemy Aces.
Vibes: Knights, Bodyguards, and of classic fantasy fiction and the selfless and strong hearts of Shōnen. Meant to directly support more than almost any other Archetype while still keeping a strong physical theme.
The Altruist
Effect: Supportive, frail, and often slow “white mages”. Interacts with all sorts of positive effect application, direct healing, and moving allies.
Pace: Altruists are often built to assist the pace of other characters when they’re at their low points. Are you having trouble moving in to start your wacky combo? Do you need an effect applied to deal effective damage? Altruist will cover those weaknesses.
Vibes: Healers, Commanders, and Bards of classic fantasy fiction and the true and pure comrades of Shōnen. Playing an Altruist should feel almost separated from the fight due to their back line strategies and lack of sustaining tools, with more indirect help to assist combat.
The Disruptor
Effect: Exploitative with unparalleled control over movement. They Interact with: Applying Negative Effects, moving enemies, and creating Terrain.
Pace: Disruptors, especially those with a more damage dealing bent, often scale higher the longer they attack a single target and stack their effects, they then return to their baseline when that enemy is defeated, beginning the scaling again.
Vibes: Though Disruptors have a solid feel to them, with each being some crueler version of another archetype, with a sense of total control being expressed in their mechanics, they still lack direct analogs (at least in my mind) that immediately differentiate their fiction from a standard version of other archetypes.
The Ruiner
Effect: Capable of the most damage dealt in a single action among all the Archetypes. They interact with: focus, tension, and finishers, and range.
Pace: The most strictly paced Archetype in the game, a Ruiner lives and dies on their ability to live as the Tension rises so that they can pull off powerful Finisher Combos with high Focus spends. Other than that, they often sacrifice other resources like AP, movement, or health to make their payoff even more effective.
Vibes: Mages, Archers, and Machinists of classic fantasy fiction and the inquisitive innovators and schemers of Shōnen. They invoke the feeling of careful preparation and complexity without actually requiring a much more complex game plan than other characters due to the long term plans that come with many of their Techniques.
Where to go from here?
Before writing this post, I felt like the 6 Archetypes that currently exist in DAWN covered quite a wide array of characters and ways to play the game, but if I were to write a new one, say for some expansion book, it’s fair to ask what I would try to do. For that reason (and for my own entertainment) I’m going to try to think of a new 7th Archetype for DAWN right here (though it will only be a theoretical one, and I will not be deigning Techniques for it).
The Pace
I find the pacing element of DAWN very important for how the game feels and makes it far more dynamic than it would be otherwise, one turn’s actions lead to the next lead to the next lead to the next, and depending on your build any of those turns could have been your high or low point of the combat.
Almost all characters in DAWN get more powerful as combat goes on due to the fact the Tension increasing every Round increases the maximum damage they can do with Finishers, the most damaging basic option. And though the turns between the first and the last are different for each Archetype, there’s none that actually get weaker as games go on.
For this reason I would be interested in a resource management Archetype, that starts fights with all sorts of tools that run out as combat goes on, making them the strongest at the start when they have all of these resources.
The Effect
I imagine I would be thinking up plenty of new mechanics for a new book, so I may as well do some now for this idea to give it some identity.
I imagine a tool based Archetype would be all about crafting and maintenance, so maybe they would have a crafting mechanic that they could do outside of combat to set the effects of their tools, like preparing spells in D&D or equipment upgrades in rpg video games.
There are plenty of ways this can be done, but as to not take from other projects for now, here’s an example of how I dealt with this idea in my first ever TTRPG “Advent Dawn”, that was also the inspo for this game.
Some of the keywords are different of course as this is a different game, but the intent is solid enough. Say this is a book about more classical adventuring, it includes some rules about finding loot and material and how those can be used. Then this new Archetype can use it to create new items based on the Techniques they’ve chosen.
The Vibe
I’d be interested in theming this around being an underdog, a la Baiken from guilty gear or Kisuke from early Bleach, someone who always seems to have the right tool for the job, and makes up for a seeming lack of physical power with these tools. The weakening over the course of a fight would also reflect that in an interesting way, showing how they can’t match up to some other characters without these tools, it’s a grim way to see your character, but it’s an appeal that doesn’t really exist with the other options. A think a good name to go with for this would be “The Artisan” as it was the name of the class I mentioned was in Advent Dawn.
And I think that’s it. Thanks to anyone who read this! I’d like to keep the posts up if people are interested, but either way, I appreciate ya.