The Combat Styles page has grown quite a bit.
You can already search the Combat Style Encyclopedia by weapons, traits, culture, troop type, area, region, milieu and other criteria; clone existing styles; build your own temporary styles; export them; and even ask the Random Special Effects tool for inspiration when somebody suddenly needs to decide what to do with that glaive.
The latest releases concentrate on making creating your own Combat Styles much easier.
The Combat Style Designer now helps you while you build – it might not always be right but it could give you some guidance.
These temporary combat styles stay in your browser local storage for awhile.
The Designer Now Gives Advice
Go to Combat Styles page open Create Temporary Style, start choosing weapons and traits, and watch the new Combat Style Tips panel.
The suggestions change according to what you have already selected.
Pick a shield, for example, and the Designer may point you toward traits that make good use of it.
The same works in the other direction. Weapons can suggest appropriate traits, while traits can suggest weapons needed to make them useful.
The Designer also recognizes less obvious weapon characteristics such as ranged weapons, long weapons, mounted weapons, clubs and other properties when looking for useful combinations.
These aren’t rules telling you what your Combat Style must contain. They are prompts intended to answer the much more useful question:
“I’ve chosen these weapons. What might work well with them?”
Or its equally common cousin:
“I really want this Trait. What equipment would make sense with it?”
Click a suggestion and it is added immediately to your style. No hunting through another list required.
Keep It in the Right Milieu
A perfectly sensible weapon can still be several centuries early.
The Designer therefore pays attention to Milieu.
Choose an appropriate setting or era and weapon suggestions are drawn from equipment suitable for that milieu. Change the milieu and the suggestions immediately change with it.
This is particularly useful when using I Feel Lucky.
Select something such as Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance etc and let the Designer assemble a style from suitable weapons and compatible traits. The generator uses the same underlying synergy rules, so specialist traits are paired with equipment that can actually support them.
It remains random enough to produce combinations you might not have considered yourself. That is rather the point.
Unarmed Fighters Are Invited to the Party
Unarmed combat is now a proper weapon category in the Designer.
You can explicitly filter for Unarmed, and the I Feel Lucky generator can incorporate unarmed fighting naturally into generated styles.
At the same time, the Designer has become slightly more discerning about what counts as suitable equipment for a human warrior.
Claws, Teeth, Tusks and similar natural weapons belonging to creatures are automatically kept out of normal human Combat Style suggestions and random generation.
Your pit fighter may therefore punch somebody in the face.
Help Without Leaving the Designer
There is now a dedicated Help panel inside the Combat Style Designer.
It explains how temporary styles, weapons, traits, suggestions and generation work without requiring you to leave your half-built style and consult another page.
The Designer’s selection lists also use the same rich tooltips as the main Combat Styles page. Hover over a weapon to inspect its statistics, or over a Combat Style Trait to see its rules.
This makes the Designer useful for experimentation as well as construction. You don’t need to remember exactly what every one of the 170+ Combat Style Traits does before trying combinations.
Clone, Change, or Start from Nothing
You don’t have to design everything from a blank sheet.
Find an existing Combat Style that is close to what you need and click Clone. It becomes a new temporary style which you can modify without changing the original database entry.
Perhaps an existing city guard is almost right, except your campaign’s guards carry spears instead of swords.
Clone it. Swap the weapons. Look at the new suggestions. Change a trait. Give the result a suitably impressive name.
Or start from scratch and use the random sword-and-sorcery name generator when inspiration deserts you.
Temporary styles live in your browser’s local storage, so they remain private to your device and never alter the main Combat Style Encyclopedia.
And Then Use It
Temporary styles aren’t second-class entries even though they do not linger in the database.
They participate in the normal Combat Styles workflow alongside database styles. You can select permanent and temporary styles together and export them as Markdown, Obsidian-flavoured Markdown, PDF or JSON.
You can also send your homemade styles straight into Roll Effects.
So you can design something like the Bronze Jackals of the Seventh Gate, equip them, give them suitable traits, and immediately generate Special Effect ideas for their weapons when they encounter the characters.
The distance between “I need an interesting group of opponents” and “roll initiative” has become considerably shorter.
Finding Combat Styles Hasn’t Gone Away
The Combat Styles page remains a searchable encyclopedia.
Searches update as you type and combine criteria using AND, so you can narrow the collection by Combat Style name, weapon, trait, culture, troop type, kind, domain, area, region or milieu.
Partial searches work. Searching for hoplite, for example, can find styles whose longer names contain that word.
There are also several useful ways of wandering off the well-travelled road:
- I Feel Lucky finds random styles matching your current filters.
- Rare Trait digs out styles containing seldom-used Combat Style Traits.
- Rare Weapon does the same for unusual weapons.
- Favorites lets you keep styles you expect to return to.
- All / Permanent / Temporary lets you decide which kinds of styles you want to see.
Hover over weapon and trait badges for their statistics and rules, or click a Combat Style name to preview its condensed card.
A Quicker Page Underneath It All
There has also been a substantial amount of work below deck.
Combat Style search indexes are now precomputed and cached, dramatically reducing the work required when the application starts. Heavy data requests use ETags, so your browser doesn’t repeatedly download the same multi-megabyte data when nothing has changed.
Startup and cache handling have also been reworked, while crawlers receive a lightweight catalog rather than consuming the resources intended for actual players.
The practical result should simply be:
the Combat Styles page gets ready faster and stays responsive.
There have also been several reliability improvements to database updates, caching and temporary-style saving.
Small Things You May Notice
The site now has automatic Major.Minor.Build versioning, with the current version visible in the sidebar and also in the mobile navigation menu.
The desktop version indicator stays at the bottom of the sidebar even when the menu scrolls, while mobile users can finally see the same information.
There have also been readability improvements to the Combat Style Designer, more reliable UI refreshing, better cache invalidation after updates, automated UI tests, and a collection of deployment and maintenance improvements.
Try Building Something
The easiest way to explore the new features is not to read about them.
Open Combat Styles → Create Temporary Style.
Choose a milieu.
Add one weapon you know you want.
Then see what the Designer suggests.
Or press I Feel Lucky and allow fate to equip the regiment.
If the result gives you an idea for tomorrow’s opponents, clone it, twist it into something nastier, give it a memorable name and send it to Roll Effects.
You can find the tool here https://www.toolsfrompavis.com/search/combatstyle/ or select it from the Toolsfrompavis sidebar.
