Notes from the Aleph: Combat x3

Notes from the Aleph will be our ongoing series of game-design notes from the Sanguine authors.

As role-playing games have evolved, they have become richer and more complex: more options in combat, more special abilities to use. What characters can and cannot do becomes more and more refined … and the books get bigger and bigger, with more and more rules. Since tabletop games are turn based — each player gets a chance to do something, and they get all the time they need to think about it — they will want to plan, they will want to know what options are available to them, they will want to read the rules. Is it any wonder that many table-top games will take three or four hours to play out a simple fight sequence that a movie, TV show, or video game could’ve handled in five minutes?

When we wrote the combat rules for IRONCLAW: Squaring the Circle, we had three primary goals:

1. Combat should be expedient.
2. Combat should be expressive.
3. Combat should be exciting.

Fast, Dramatic, Expedient

Many modern RPGs have very high numbers that can take a long time to play out. If you only have, say, a 1 in 3 chance of hitting a target … and if you only do 1/4 of the target’s hit points every hit … then, on average, it will take 12 exchanges until the target goes down.

If a player takes about one minute to make their tactical decision, roll their dice, and note the results… then a game with five players will take about five minutes to play out a round. Given the example we listed before, it will take about nine rounds until at least one fighter drops, so that’s about 60 minutes before there’s a single meaningful victory. Once there’s an imbalance and ganging up, it will be another round or two until the fight ends. That’s over an hour for a simple fight. And if the dice aren’t rolling well, it could take even longer than that.

And all of these numbers assume that everyone makes their decision in only one minute! Combat should be expedient. It should feel fast and furious, like an action movie. Every roll should mean something!

Compelling, Inventive, Expressive

Some games have responded to the increased complexity of fights … by downsizing anything that’s not a fight. Player-Characters become containers for equipment and combat skills; if anything else happens, that’s considered a garnish to the main dish of battle. The game becomes more of a war-game than a role-playing game, and the players feel unsatisfied that they can’t really do anything else other than swing a sword or blast a monster. Combat should be expressive. It should advance the story, not be the story.

Dire, Perilous, Exciting

Other games take a u-turn, where combat is kept simple to the point of being too simple. If fights are resolved with a single die roll, then players feel cheated that they contributed to the battle in any meaningful way. Fighting becomes something to be avoided, being too random to be fun. And that’s a shame if you’re trying to play a game with any action sequences at all, if you want to be the heroes of your favorite books, television, and movies.

The worst games don’t address this issue at all. Rules are heaped upon rules, and doing anything -– fighting, socializing, crafting -– takes hours of game time. Each play session is a grind as little progress is made. Combat should be exciting. It should be part of the fun, and not get in the way of the fun.

Three Times The Action

With IRONCLAW, our goal was to make the game like an action movie, TV show, or fiction thriller. Many stories set up with a small fight, have some investigation and problem-solving in the middle, then end with a climactic battle … and all are done in one helping. Assuming players only get together for three to five hours at a time, how could we set the game up so we can get everything done, and have it still be fun?

• Sides of battle. Many games impose an “initiative” rule, where every combatant rolls a random number to determine when they act in the turn. Fair enough … but since rolling a unique number for every fighter might confuse a game host, the bad guys often use “group initiative”, rolling just a single number for the lot of them. The game effect is to have all the bad guys as one collective mind, organized and ruthless, against the heroes … while splitting the heroes up and preventing them from working together, as a team. IRONCLAW eliminates this arbitrary mechanic and has all the players working together … then the combat and damage rules are set up so that they will need to work together if they want to win!
• Counter-Attacks. In most role-playing games, a slow grind sets up as warriors attack, and miss … then attack, and miss … then attack, and miss … in other words, many rounds where not much happens. With IRONCLAW, when someone attacks you, a common defense is to attack them right back! Simply put, almost twice as much action happens, which can reduce the time to resolve a fight in half.
• Status Damage. In some games, each combatant is either “fine”, with positive hit points, or “dead”, and out of hit points. Getting hurt is just an abstract concept – a character might bounce a bullet off their skull, but when their turn rolls around, it was just damage, there’s no lasting effect. Players are encouraged to “role-play” these abstract numbers by describing the bad things that happen … but why not make that part of the fun? IRONCLAW doesn’t use numbers — Damage is expressed in the terms the characters themselves would use, like “Hurt”, “Injured”, or “Dying”.
• Morale Loss as a Damage Mechanic. It wasn’t that long ago that role-playing games had a “Morale” rule, where bad guys would run away after suffering heavy losses. Today, that realism is largely gone, as so many people throw their lives away, fighting to the death. With IRONCLAW, characters beaten to within an inch of their lives become “Afraid”, losing their will to fight. Bad guys will flee … unless they have a major character to urge them on. Players may flee, starting an exciting chase sequence, a staple of movies and television. If they want to stay, they will have to work together, by giving each other covering fire, by rallying one another, and by falling back and re-grouping for another assault.
• Small numbers. Too many games give all combatants dozens or hundreds of hit points. Gaming out any fight takes hours, and often every character, major and minor alike, have numbers way too high, and everyone’s a super-hero who shrugs off explosions and gunshots to the head. Some games try a compromise where they declare some characters to be “mooks” or “minions”, imposing a “quick kill” rule on them where they can be killed instantly. Not only do special quick-kill rules make the game more complex, they err too far in the other direction –- these foes who were supposed to be feared could be taken out by small children armed with slingshots, which makes our players feel less than heroic. IRONCLAW treats everyone the same – there’s only one damage mechanic for everyone –- and then gives major characters an upgrade to keep them from being taken out by a single lucky hit. And the emphasis is on single -– once the protection of a combat save is gone, our heroes clearly know they’re in over their heads, and it’s time to run.

As your character upgrades to better equipment, higher levels of skills, and more special abilities, we’ve kept the three Xs in mind: Expedient, Expressive, and Exciting. You’ll now be able to play out two or three fights and still have time for spying on the Bisclavret diplomat, for stealing the war-chest from the Indictateur spies, and for fencing the gold to off-shore merchants. Adventures can be like popular adventure stories, with moments of dire peril broken up by careful scheming, all done with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of fun!