Block / Guard — Design Codex

What it is. Hold a button to raise a guard that absorbs incoming hits, trading a resource — stamina, chip HP, or positioning — for safety. The defensive floor that anyone can reach.

Player fantasy / why it’s fun. You are the wall. The tension isn’t the block — it’s the meter draining while the enemy hammers, and the moment you must gamble on when to drop it and strike back.

The verb

Hold to raise guard; incoming attacks hit the guard instead of you, paying a cost each time. Release to act.

How it feels / why it’s fun

Low floor, high ceiling. Blocking is one held button — trivial to reach, so a new player survives the first fight. Mastery lives in when to stop: guard-break punishes patience taken too far.
Tempo, not spike. Block sets the rhythm of a fight — it slows the exchange, forces the attacker to commit, and buys thinking time. Compare mechanic-parry, which sets spikes: a parry is a razor-thin window that flips momentum instantly. Block is the metronome; parry is the drum hit. A combat model that offers both gives players a defensive [[system-counter-systems|counter]] gradient from safe-and-slow to risky-and-explosive.
The meter is the drama. A full guard bar is confidence; a flickering one is panic. Draining it is the [[pattern-risk-reward|risk/reward]] pump — see system-resource-loops.

Tuning levers

Lever	What it controls	Sane default
Chip %	Fraction of blocked damage that leaks through	10–25% of raw
Guard meter	Stamina pool that blocking spends	100, blocks ~5–7 heavy hits
Per-hit drain	Meter cost per blocked hit (scale by attack weight)	light 8 / heavy 30
Regen delay + rate	Pause before meter refills, then speed	1.0 s delay, 20/s
Guard-break stun	Frames you’re helpless when meter empties	0.8–1.5 s (one free heavy)
Chip-kill?	Can chip reduce you below 1 HP?	No (floor at 1) — chip-kills feel unfair
Directional?	Must guard face the attacker	On for 1v1 depth, off for hordes
Startup frames	Delay before guard is active	2–4 frames (punishable if late)

Cross the drain rate against enemy DPS so a held block is a losing trade over time — that pressure is what forces the release. If holding forever is safe, block becomes [[antipattern-boring-optimal|the boring optimal]].

Slots into

Genres: genre-soulslike (the canonical stamina-guard), genre-fighting-game (block-stun + guard meter + chip), genre-action-adventure, genre-metroidvania, genre-survival-horror (scarce guard = dread).
Anchors: anchor-dark-souls (shield stamina, guard-break, poise), anchor-street-fighter (block-stun, chip damage, guard crush), anchor-hades (the Aspect-of-Aegis block-into-bash), anchor-cuphead (parry-only absence of block sharpens why block matters).
Systems: system-combat-model, system-counter-systems, system-telegraphs (you must read the wind-up to block it), system-enemy-archetypes (guard-breakers exist to answer turtling), system-status-effects.

Twist seams

Block but the damage is stored and released when you attack (mechanic-swap). Guard doesn’t spend the hit — it banks it. Your next strike deals the accumulated chip as bonus damage, so blocking becomes a loading gesture, not just survival. Turtling now sets up a payoff; see mechanic-charge-attack and pattern-escalation-and-payoff.
Block but blocking recharges the enemy, not you (perspective). Every hit you absorb feeds their super meter or breaks your poise faster — so defense funds the offense you’re defending against. Patience is a slow-bleed trap that forces aggression; pairs with system-difficulty-and-dda pressure and pattern-pacing-and-tension.
Block but it’s positional (mode-shift). Guard only covers one facing; hold it and you can’t turn, so blocking commits your orientation. Now defense is a spatial puzzle against flankers — leans toward genre-tactics and system-encounter-design.

How it wires to Hayao

Model block as a pure state on the combat entity, not a view flag: a guarding boolean plus a numeric guard meter that lives in simulation state and flows into world.hash(). Chip, drain, regen, and break are deterministic transitions on that state — the guard-break stun is just a timed status. See system-combat-model for the state/resolution split.
Resolve hits in a stable, ordered pass so simultaneous attacks against a guard drain the meter identically every run. Route any variance (crit chip, break-chance) through a deterministic RNG, never wall-clock.
For the input feel — hold-to-hold, buffered release, startup frames — prototype the timing in isolation before wiring it to a whole fight. Study the parry timing lab under sandboxes/ as the sibling reference for frame windows; block is the same clock with a wider mouth.
The guard flash, spark, and meter bar are cosmetic view — keep them out of the hash. Choreograph the impact (see pattern-juice-choreography) so a blocked hit reads as blocked; prove the feel per pattern-readability and the verify half.

Fails when…

Holding forever is free. No drain, no break, infinite chip-immunity → the fight stalls into a turtle. Block needs a ceiling. → antipattern-boring-optimal.
Chip kills feel arbitrary. Dying through a “successful” block reads as an antipattern-input-lie unless the chip-kill is loudly telegraphed and consistent. Floor at 1 HP by default.
Guard-break isn’t telegraphed. If the meter or the break has no [[system-telegraphs|tell]], the punish feels like [[antipattern-rng-frustration|randomness]], not a lesson.
Block trivializes parry. If safe blocking is nearly as good as a risky parry, the parry is [[antipattern-fake-choice|dead weight]] — the whole point is that block is the safer, slower option and parry pays more.
Startup is instant. Zero-frame guard means every reaction is free; the read stops mattering. Give block a punishable cost for lateness.