Vampire's new "three-round combat" rule

The new Vampire RPG reportedly has a rule for often limiting combat to three rounds. That rule sure feels like something my buddy Ken Hite would have written, and I have been toying with a similar idea myself. I've played out plenty of long combats where the last rounds were a grind (hello, 4E), and I like cutting to the chase. In 13th Age, we use the "escalation die" to make combats end faster, but Vampire's 3-round rule is an even stronger solution to combats that go too long. Do you have experience with this new rule in Vampire, and if so how does it play?

The V5 rule is really a bit more guideline and samples of ways to end a conflict after three rounds.

First, it outright says if everybody is having fun with the round by round, keep going.

Thrn it suggests basically a sort of "hostage setup."

After three rounds, players and the GM csn choose s number of "resolution options" like making concessions etc. But this is fine under the "hostage threat of " only one more roll" so if no concessions or other conclusions are reached, one final die roll will decide the event with the odds heavily influenced by the current "score " of the first three falls. So if you are behind two-to-one or three-to-one, you really want to find a way to avoid that "one roll" if you are tied, do you want a 50-50 roll with severe consequences?

There are good ideas, meaningful rules etc and it is spread across their basic and advanced but it is useful.

Mostly the key is to allow a few rounds of strutting your stuff and being smart or ttickery, but then cash-out that to wrap things up.

Not able to answer the question, but do want to address the issue.

I would draw a sharp distinction between combats where the fiction is changing every round and those that are simple damage races with the fiction being basically unchanged each round.

Imagine a circumstance where you limited all action scenes in movies to 18 seconds, and if they lasted longer than 18 seconds you cut away from them to the conclusion. I think that's how an arbitrary limit on rounds would feel to me.

Now granted, I think there are many movies where combats go on and on without really adding to narrative, and simply exist for reasons of spectacle and frequently those bore me. But on the other hand, consider truly great cinematic combats like the climatic battle in Return of the Jedi where the protagonists are simultaneously fighting on three fronts and each of those three fronts has a narrative arc which throws action toward the other. That battle goes on for I'd guess 30 minutes of screen time and while the Ewoks beating up the Storm Troopers might be cheesy, it's not boring.

One thing that table top games tend not to do well is spectacle (or Sensation) so tabletop combat tends to be inherently less visceral than cinema while simultaneously taking longer to resolve. So while such combats can bore, in my experience they do not bore if during the combat the fiction is continually evolving in interesting ways.

I'm not hugely familiar with 4e combats, but from reputation they started to drag when the players ran out of options, were clearly in control of the battle, the fiction was no longer evolving, and yet several rounds of combat stretched out before the participants just to whittle down the hit points in a damage race the protagonists were obviously going to win.

I've had similar experiences in 1e with battles against large numbers of mooks, or in 3e against large numbers of low level undead, where it was clear that the foes couldn't significantly threaten the PCs and the combat devolved to the chore of whittling away the foes.

So for me, the question is not "Has the fight gone 3 rounds?", but rather, "Is the fight more resembling good cinema, or is it more resembling two 7 year olds playing the card game "War"?"

Trying to imagine a game were "combat is always over in 3 rounds", I can only imagine doing this if the game abandoned any attempt to simulate the events of combat, and instead staged combat as a sort of play in three acts where dice just provided guidance for the narration. Have you ever run combat in Amber Diceless roleplaying, for example? I could imagine a three Act rule applying to Amber Diceless. I have a hard time imagining it applying to any game which simulates a series of events.

I don't like this rule. I'm a firm believer that it's not over until it's over, and that you need to actually play it out in order to determine what happens. The outcome of combat is too important to resolve through narration. Even if you know that you're going to win, it's still important to the narrative to determine the details, because nothing that happens in a combat scenario is trivial. If someone keeps fighting until their last breath, then that's a different story from someone running away; and if they do turn to run, whether you let them go says a lot about your character, compared to shooting them in the back or chasing them down.

But I haven't seen it in play, and I haven't even seen the full text of the rules, so I'll suspend judgment for now. It looks terrible, but maybe it's not so bad in practice.

Thanks, everyone. I was curious as to how they could fit a three-round rule of thumb into a pretty standard 90s-era system. I'm a big fan of faster battles, and I'm happy to see other game designers trying out various approaches toward that goal.

While not quite the same as the three round combat, in Sentinels Comics RPG (which is based on Fate Accelerated, I think), combat is timed. There are only so many rounds until the combat is over, regardless of who has the upper hand. What happens when the last round is over depends on how close to winning the heroes were.

As 5ekyu points out, the three round rule is more of a guideline for conflict resolution rather than an absolute. Not only is it designed to prevent conflicts from growing too tedious in length, it's designed to give players and DMs some narrative control over the outcome to make things interesting. This isn't something you're likely to use during the climatic event of a chapter.

In most RPGs, at least in my experience, combat tends to be an all or nothing proposition. Either my side wins and we kill everyone or their side wins and we're facing a total party kill situation. And most people, even vampires, aren't driven to fight to the death every time they throw down. In Vampire, the players and DM discuss the outcome of the fight opening a lot of possibilities more interesting than just killing someone.

One plus is that nobody need necessarily worry about their characters dying if the PCs lose the fight. This works for my Vampire games because typically the Prince is the only one with the right to kill someone. Yeah, even in self-defense the Prince can come down hard on someone who kills another vampire. Who says unlife is fair? (Though this might not work for non-Camarilla games.)

Celebrim said:

Imagine a circumstance where you limited all action scenes in movies to 18 seconds, and if they lasted longer than 18 seconds you cut away from them to the conclusion. I think that's how an arbitrary limit on rounds would feel to me.

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Let me reframe this, going away from D&D's 6-second turns.

Imagine a movie where non-climatic battles topped at three minutes of screen time for actual fight sequences, where if it had not been conclusively resolved by a win/loss it was resolved by a plot twist, escape, or other bit of storytelling.

Put like that, it sounds downright common, not arbitrary. Sure, some movies just about fighting might spend more time (and so can you - continue if everyone is having fun was part of it), but from a pacing perspective any scene in a movie will be used to tell it's part and then advance to the next scene, not linger into what in an RPG would be a grind.

MGibster said:

In most RPGs, at least in my experience, combat tends to be an all or nothing proposition. Either my side wins and we kill everyone or their side wins and we're facing a total party kill situation.

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You get there in the next part of your response I quoted, but I do have a problem with this from both the PCs side and the enemy's side. In addition to always fighting to the death being downright stupid, it makes me think of "always X" alignment races. 1. How does an Always Chaotic Evil race even survive? This is taken to it's natural, and ridiculous, conclusion with the Tannar'ri (cooler name than demon anyway), 2. Even the newborn who has new experience with anything yet is Chaotic Evil? Um . . . how?

And most people, even vampires, aren't driven to fight to the death every time they throw down.

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Indeed, the PCs or their enemies may need their opponents alive (or undead) for some reason. This could be a combination player/GM problem. I have seen a few cases here where players will not have their character run from a fight they are losing either because they don't think they'll make it, dislike the running away rules, or of course the GM is a jerk and will close off the escape route whether by monster or combat convenient obstacle. Most people don't want to die (or die the True Death), and some systems even encourage not engaging in combat if it's not necessary.

In early D&D, there was a lot of fleeing from monsters. Also, if you're playing in a dungeon, there's no narrative reason for you to defeat any particular enemy, so it was OK not to win. As the game has become more forgiving and more structured (eg, with reasons for your fights), running away has lost its appeal, and now player characters are set up to win most battles. If an approach like the three-round battle allows characters to lose more fights, that seems like a good addition.

In the new Over the Edge, the GM is coached to set up conflicts where the PCs can lose and the story keeps going, which is an intentional shift from how D&D works these days.