I like Devil May Cry a lot. I think I like spectacle fighters—the tongue-in-cheek name given to the subgenre by games journalist and developer Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw—in general, but I’ve only played a few of them, and of those I like the aesthetic of Devil May Cry the best. On this, the 25th anniversary of the first game in the series, I want to touch on how to get the feel of a spectacle fighting in D&D beyond simply “do cool things”.
There are a bunch of things that can go into making an adventure or campaign feel like Devil May Cry. Obviously, it needs to be belligerently stylish. There should be unique weapons, some of which don’t make a lick of sense, like dual-wielded chainsaws that combine into a motorcycle. Armor rules should be different, because characters are more likely to fight shirtless or in miniskirts than wisely protected by heavy plate. But to keep this very slightly more focused and stop myself from trying to write four or five subsystems for a single post, I want to talk about one mechanic in particular: building a combo.
Combos
It’s startlingly difficult to find good screenshots from these games.
- Consistency is hitting enemies and not getting hit. Damaging enemies builds your combo, avoiding combat or failing to attack reduces it, and taking damage yourself cancels it.
- Variation is changing actions. You’re always fighting, but using different moves and different weapons builds combo faster than spamming the same simple attacks over and over. Just like D&D, a character who stands still and full-attacks every round is just not as dynamic or interesting as a character using multiple abilities.
Thus a combo system in the vein of Devil May Cry must reward players for being active in combat and for avoiding repetition.
The sticking point with tabletop games is that success isn’t a direct result of the player’s ability. A video game can reward you for dexterity and situational awareness (and the spot where they overlap: reflexes) but in D&D you’re always at the mercy of the dice. That’s why I don’t think a one-to-one simulation of Devil May Cry’s combo system works. You can’t dodge your way out of an enemy rolling a 19 and it doesn’t feel right to punish a player for it by ending their streak. Combos should usually be based on actions the players can chose, not the dice-based results of those actions, so the players always feel like they’re in charge of their own momentum.
A fair warning: a combo system does violate one of the intentional design decisions of 5E, the idea that the rules have no memory. In 3E, monsters had abilities like a dragon’s breath weapon, which recharged 1d4 rounds after using it, or spells like lesser restoration, which took three rounds to cast. This forced players and DMs to track various temporary states with different durations, and remembering whether they did something on round two or three was critical to acting on round five. Newer editions smoothed that over by adding recharge rolls (where you only have to know whether you used an ability, not when) and removing abilities that took multiple rounds to spin up. But combos explicitly key off previous actions, so if we want to have stylish attack chains, we have to acknowledge the assumptions and designs we’re breaking.
Tactical Feats, Again
I think the cleanest way to work combos into 5E is by bringing back 3E’s tactical feats. I’ve written about them before. Basically they’re feats that give you a bonus if you do certain things in a certain order. This might be best communicated via examples.
Antipode Master
Combo Feat
You gain the following benefits.
Sudden Thaw. When you damage a creature with a spell that deals cold damage, the next spell you cast before the end of your next turn ignores that creatures’s fire resistance.
Cold Snap. When you damage a creature with a spell that deals fire damage, the next spell you cast before the end of your next turn ignores that creatures’s cold resistance.
This is a single-character tactical feat. By swapping back and forth between cold and fire spells, the player effectively ignores the cold and fire resistance of any creature he hits more than once. He could use fire bolt to set up a cone of cold, or swap between burning hands and a cold version of it enabled by metamagic, and so on. It has more setup than Element Master (from the Player’s Handbook), but it works on two energy types instead of one. You could make a version of this with any two elements as long as you and the players can think of a stylish way to depict it. For Antipode Master, maybe the rapid freezing and burning shatters a creature’s armor or builds to an explosion. The exact result doesn’t need a distinct mechanical effect beyond the bonus the feat provides.
A tactical feat can also build to some end instead of running indefinitely:
Finishing Blow
Combo Feat
When you use your action to attack the same creature on three consecutive rounds, on the third round you may gain a +5 bonus to damage rolls against that creature. You may only use this bonus for one round against a given creature.
The first sentence describes the function of the feat. If you attack the same enemy for three or more rounds, you build momentum toward one round of increased damage. It works for every type of attack (melee, ranged, magic) and doesn’t stop a character from attacking other enemies as long as they use their action to keep the pressure on someone. The second sentence is there to preempt interpretations of the feat in which a player tries to get the bonus on the third and every subsequent round. Effectively you can attack on rounds one and two to get the benefit on round three, or on rounds one through three to get the benefit on round four (treating round two as the first round for the purposes of the feat), but not both.
I know, it’s clunky. Which is why the baseline list of combo feats I put together includes a glossary section to define terms that are a bit more elegant:
Build-Your-Own-Combo
You’ll notice that I leaned more on the “consistency” side of combo design than the “variation” side. That’s almost an accident. I tried to think of feats that could work for a variety of characters in a variety of parties, and I know the first drafts of my rules additions (feats, spells, etc.) tend to be underpowered because I’m jumpy about breaking things. But Devil May Cry is about doing unique, character-specific things to excess, so treat these examples more as structural guidelines than proper, campaign-ready rules. Your players might love a feat that gives them +50 damage after their tenth missed attack against the same creature, or a feat that makes their next healing spell give the whole party tons of temporary hit points if they’ve already spent twenty-five levels’ worth of spells slots on healing in a given encounter. Your party may trade back and forth between necrotic and radiant damage, or focus every character’s attacks into a single devastating move, or have enough ranged options that their tactics can play with distance from a given enemy. There isn’t a one-size-fits all set of combos and there shouldn’t be.
When you’re writing something for your character or party, you can basically do whatever you want, as long as:
- The challenges you give the party warrant the power level. I mean, yes, obviously you should balance the challenge level like in any adventure, but Devil May Cry lends itself to especially unreasonable encounters. It’s not out of the question to have monsters that can only be won by certain combo powers, making those players a plus for those enemies.
- The trigger conditions for a feat are appropriately long or difficult. Large benefits should have large costs or build-up, which is why fighting games only let you use super moves once you’ve filled a meter by attacking. Figure out what your players are happy to commit to a combo, then make the trigger conditions more onerous than that. Combo feats are supposed to restrict a character’s actions then reward them for acting within those restrictions. If the restrictions aren’t limiting the player’s choices, they don’t warrant a bonus. Or, as I used to have in the Laws, “a penalty that is not a penalty should not be treated as a penalty”.
- It’s super-cool. You want powers that feel fun and stylish during actual gameplay. “You’re immune to damage once you stand still for six rounds” is neat in specific circumstances, but effectively it means “at the beginning of round seven, the enemies become totally ineffective as long as the rest of the party leaves and you solo everything else with no difficulty.” That’s more of a set piece or a campaign concept than a PC power in that you have to build everything around it.
Unsurprisingly, this post did eventually come down to “do cool things”. That’s where we get the “spectacle” in “spectacle fighter”. Flavoring and reskinning the rules is more or less required to get something as varied and flashy as Devil May Cry into a rigid tabletop game like D&D. Treat this as an opportunity, a feature rather than a bug. Combo feats are a way to figure out what you want to see and build rules for it instead of limiting yourself to what’s already written.