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Everything is numbers and modifiers

Written 2026-10-27 from the project's own design docs.

The principle: every thing in a game, whether a piece of armour, a rocket, a banana peel, a freight train or a god's spell, is some combination of numbers and modifiers applied to whoever owns it and/or whatever it affects. Things differ only in which numbers they touch and from which angle.

The phrasing is from The Crawl, where the founder called it the point of the whole system: "it's all just some combination of math applied at different angles."

Why it matters

  • Variety becomes data, not code. If a new race, weapon or deity is just a new set of numbers and modifiers on the same model, adding one is cheap. If each needs hand-written behaviour, every addition is a programming job, and the game's variety is capped by programmer time.
  • Balance becomes comparable. When two things are built from the same parts, you can compare them on the same scale. The Crawl's founder put it as giving "the illusion of infinite variety" while tuning everything to one standard system.
  • Strange interactions come for free. If a banana peel and a freight train both just apply numbers to whatever they hit, they compose with everything else that does the same, without special cases.
  • The decision is cheap early and expensive late. Retrofitting one shared model onto a pile of hand-built systems means rebuilding them.

How it shows up in practice

One shared system for things that look different

The Crawl's founder: a magic missile and a submachine gun might both fire three-round bursts. They have different models, names and firing behaviour, "but each of those things can be defined with the same game system." The same idea set a pricing rule for spells: a full mana pool should equal one magazine of the spell's real-world equivalent.

One building block per kind of thing

The Crawl's conditions and environment rules use exactly two building blocks for all non-weapon harm:

  • a condition on a body (damage over time, movement and aim penalties, how it ends, how it stacks, an onset delay), of which bleeding, poison, burning and disease are all instances;
  • exposure in an area (fire, heat, cold fill a meter; thresholds apply conditions).

The test of the design: smoke, drowning, electricity, radiation and falling should all fit those two without new rules.

Don't hard-code the obvious limits

Two small decisions in The Crawl show the habit of leaving the model open:

  • Every object has a weight, not just weapons. A weapon is an object that can also be wielded. That lets Strength govern lifting, throwing and carrying anything.
  • A condition names the pool it drains. Every condition so far drains health, but the founder noted nothing should prevent one from draining stamina, mana or a pool not yet invented.

Mechanics first, names last

In The Crawl's order of work, the physics come first; then names get placed on combinations of mechanics. The founder called that second step playing "Mad Libs" with race, class, weapon and ability names. Real variety has to come from play styles that are mechanically different, not from new names on the same thing.

The hard part that remains

Saying "everything is modifiers" is easy. The model's shape is the real design work, and in The Crawl it was still open when the project was parked:

  • what a modifier names (which number, on whom);
  • its operation (add, multiply, set);
  • the order operations apply in;
  • how modifiers from the same source stack;
  • how long one lasts (instant, timed, while equipped, permanent).

Until those are settled, systems built earlier (weapons, conditions, attribute formulas) stay as separate hand-built shapes. The Crawl's plan was to rebuild them all on the modifier model before tuning any numbers. See Theory before math.

A caution from the same project

Variety is not the same as flavour layered on top. The Crawl's combat went through a pass of "flavours", special moves and affixes, which the founder then scrapped in favour of a plain, standard real-world base (Combat and items). The shared model has to come first; the flourishes can be rebuilt on top of it later.

Where this came from