Vampire's new "three-round combat" rule

Thinking over the game systems I play regularly, three rounds does seem about right for a combat-heavy game. For a combat light game, one roll (or none, in DramaSystem where typically my players agree who wins combat without rolling ...).

In D&D 4E, your cool thing takes a round to set up, very often, so you have a set-up round, a cool thing round and a round for your fallback / regular routine.

In 13A, similar, except that characters have varying approaches. My monk, for example, really likes to get to the third round for their finishing move!

Deadlands Classic (pre Savage Worlds) is slow fiddly combat. Three rounds often have characters doing the same sort of thing, but the first round is engagement and often causes much confusion.

Fate -- I'm not honestly sure here. Combat isn't as defined a thing, but when I care about people taking actions in turns, three rounds seems normal before it gets boring.

Throwing my memory back, Since Jonathan Tweet is the OP, when I ran Everyway combats were typically short -- one or two rounds maybe; four would have meant a major battle or a cascade of activity.

So, overall, I think I like the idea of having a default ending mechanism after three rounds, with a caveat that if the players are having fun, it can continue.

GrahamWills said:

Throwing my memory back, Since Jonathan Tweet is the OP, when I ran Everyway combats were typically short -- one or two rounds maybe; four would have meant a major battle or a cascade of activity.

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Yep, like the new Over the Edge, Everway does not have a combat system separate from conflict resolution in general. That game is also due for a relaunch, starting with a digital relaunch of 1st edition this year.

Jonathan Tweet said:

Yep, like the new Over the Edge, Everway does not have a combat system separate from conflict resolution in general. That game is also due for a relaunch, starting with a digital relaunch of 1st edition this year.

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That is exciting news; I assume I'll hear about it in "all the usual channels" when you have more to disclose!

GrahamWills said:

That is exciting news; I assume I'll hear about it in "all the usual channels" when you have more to disclose!

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Yes, indeed. The publisher is a new company set up to publish Everway, so some people have missed this news. The current home for information online is the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/EverwayGame/

GrahamWills said:

Thinking over the game systems I play regularly, three rounds does seem about right for a combat-heavy game. For a combat light game, one roll (or none, in DramaSystem where typically my players agree who wins combat without rolling ...).

In D&D 4E, your cool thing takes a round to set up, very often, so you have a set-up round, a cool thing round and a round for your fallback / regular routine.

In 13A, similar, except that characters have varying approaches. My monk, for example, really likes to get to the third round for their finishing move!

Deadlands Classic (pre Savage Worlds) is slow fiddly combat. Three rounds often have characters doing the same sort of thing, but the first round is engagement and often causes much confusion.

Fate -- I'm not honestly sure here. Combat isn't as defined a thing, but when I care about people taking actions in turns, three rounds seems normal before it gets boring.

Throwing my memory back, Since Jonathan Tweet is the OP, when I ran Everyway combats were typically short -- one or two rounds maybe; four would have meant a major battle or a cascade of activity.

So, overall, I think I like the idea of having a default ending mechanism after three rounds, with a caveat that if the players are having fun, it can continue.

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There's a question between the lines of this quote: how much time, regardless of what a round is, does combat take before it gets dull or wasteful? For Vampire, three rounds might represent the typical amount of game time spent, say 30 minutes, before players start to wish they could go back to role-playing. I remember a Savage Worlds (fast, fun and furious) combat in which I saw one character, round after round, somehow use an endless Bennie (?) to avoid defeat. I'd swear the combat took an hour or more, but I was ready to move on after 15 minutes. In D&D 5, I'm about ready for combat to end after I roll my second Miss

(Skip to 0:45 - looks like ENWorld might not like my timestamp link)
[video=youtube_share;Koxkg7C216c]https://youtu.be/Koxkg7C216c?t=43[/video]

DMMike said:

There's a question between the lines of this quote: how much time, regardless of what a round is, does combat take before it gets dull or wasteful? For Vampire, three rounds might represent the typical amount of game time spent, say 30 minutes, before players start to wish they could go back to role-playing. I remember a Savage Worlds (fast, fun and furious) combat in which I saw one character, round after round, somehow use an endless Bennie (?) to avoid defeat. I'd swear the combat took an hour or more, but I was ready to move on after 15 minutes. In D&D 5, I'm about ready for combat to end after I roll my second Miss

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So this is the interesting thing -- for me, the actual time does not make a difference. It really is the rounds.
So, for example, I play D&D 4E because I love the team-based tactical combat. D&D is all about combat and for me 4E was the most gratifying combat system to play. I can role-play in pretty much any system, and some systems are designed around it, so when I play D&D, its mostly about combat and 4E does that exceptionally well. So three rounds ins 4E takes maybe 30 minutes in my typical group. Can be as much as 45. But that is because the combat is complex and we enjoy and work with that complexity: Player A has a slow start, but as a rogue I want him to go first so I activate a power to swap initiative, and then use my Cypher ability to move as initiative is rolled to get to a good position. He goes and dazes a bunch of enemies, which allows my high-damage attack to be used, but since he hits 3 of them I need to switch weapons and ... yeah, it takes time. But it's fun time!

In 13th Age, which is my go-to fantasy system as it gives me 90% of the combat fun of 4E with a quarter the hassle three rounds of combat will be 15-20 minutes. My options are more constrained, but I've made a choice about which forms to attack with (spoiler: it is hard to resist the option to replace the finishing move with a clone of a fireball attack, even if it sometimes hits a few friends) and roleplaying typically occurs (which almost never does in 4E unless the wizard summons a succubus). So if it takes longer than 15 minutes it's often because of non-combat activity.

I recently ran an AD&D campaign where combat might actually go any rounds, but every round is almost identical (at low levels) so even though combat takes 3 minutes for three rounds, we're good to move on.

So, I think it really is about number of actions, not actual time. If you like a game system, you enjoy the time you spend doing what the system is built around doing, so combat might take 90% if the time (4E) or 5% of the time (DramaSystem). But, for me, the fun with a game is making decisions and doing different things in different situations. And after about three rounds it seems that I stop making decisions and just start doing the same thing, so why continue?

GrahamWills said:

So this is the interesting thing -- for me, the actual time does not make a difference. It really is the rounds.
So, for example, I play D&D 4E because . . . yeah, it takes time. But it's fun time!

In 13th Age, which is my go-to fantasy system as it gives me 90% of the combat fun of 4E with a quarter the hassle three rounds of combat will be 15-20 minutes. . .

and roleplaying typically occurs (which almost never does in 4E unless the wizard summons a succubus).

But, for me, the fun with a game is making decisions and doing different things in different situations. And after about three rounds it seems that I stop making decisions and just start doing the same thing, so why continue?

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Interesting how 4E's combat became a "hassle" in reference to 13th Age!

I'm curious about the role-playing that occurs when the succubus shows up. On second thought, nevermind.

Good points, but it sounds like you're coming from groups that play efficiently, which tells me that, yeah, any duration of combat can be fun. However, when everyone involved just seems to be rolling poorly, or you have new/inexperienced players at the table, the time involved can be a real issue.

What about a three-phone-rule? When three or more players start Facebooking during combat, combat ends. Although, that might be a sign of a bigger problem . . .

GrahamWills said:

So, I think it really is about number of actions, not actual time. If you like a game system, you enjoy the time you spend doing what the system is built around doing, so combat might take 90% if the time (4E) or 5% of the time (DramaSystem). But, for me, the fun with a game is making decisions and doing different things in different situations. And after about three rounds it seems that I stop making decisions and just start doing the same thing, so why continue?

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I think that there is an overlap between your perspective here and the perspective I've had on the problem.

My take on this has always been that the fight can continue to be interesting if the fiction is evolving each round. That is to say, in each new round, the player is considering something new - reinforcements, changed distance of engagement, altered terrain elements, allies needing aid, innocents in need of protection, or whatever.

Your take is that combat can continue to be interesting if the player is considering new choices each round, and that in general, after about 3 rounds you've generally run out of choices to make. The amount of time you take doesn't bother you so long as the choices which are made during that time were sufficiently interesting. So 4e can take longer than 1e, and yet the experience is roughly equivalent, because the choices made in 4e were more interesting than the choices made in 1e. Payoff is roughly equal.

So there is a potential overlap here, that as long as the combat kept offering up legitimately new choices and options, the combat could continue to be interesting. You would have a reason to continue, because you haven't stopped making decisions.

In 4e, that clock was normally set by the number of encounter and daily powers you'd typically have available in a combat. After that, you were reduced to your at will powers, and you no longer had interesting enough of choices to justify spending all that time. Likewise, in 1e AD&D, you didn't have many choices to begin with, and typically after the closing and charge rounds, it was all a slog after that. So even if the time to perform that slog was short, it got dull because, no choices.

There is an interesting parallel to the rule in chess that if a board position repeats itself three times, it's a stalemate and the game is over.

Celebrim said:

I think that there is an overlap between your perspective here and the perspective I've had on the problem.

...

My take on this has always been that the fight can continue to be interesting if the fiction is evolving each round.

There is an interesting parallel to the rule in chess that if a board position repeats itself three times, it's a stalemate and the game is over.

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Definitely, yes. I should have cited your response as it crystallized my thinking. For me, any discussion of mechanics or approaches has one central goal: making things as enjoyable as possible for the participants. It’s maybe obvious and banal, but it’s explicitly what I look for and supersedes other goals. So your statement that so long as the fiction is evolving each round and remain interesting, combat should keep going, is absolutely what I feel is the goal of combat. Honestly, it’s the same in investigation — so longs as finding puzzles or clues is interesting and the fiction evolves, it’s good.

My thoughts on the three-round limit are more on mechanical ways to support the goal. A good GM will call a fight when it gets boring regardless of system. What I find interesting is he concept of building rules that directly support the concept of ending combat before it gets boring — mechanical support for your goal. 13th Age uses the escalation dice to end fights faster, which I honestly love. The idea of setting a three round combat limit as another way of doing that made me think a bit about if that would work; what I would lose and what it gains. And overall I feel that it is worth trying out as an idea.

For whatever reason three is a good number of times to do something before it gets tedious. I know that when I have played or run a set of sessions where there are N mcguffins to get, if N>3 it is less effective. The latter sessions have less excitement and I have to battle that. I just saw Infinity War yesterday, and (risking this will de-rail the thread) a few less stones to collect would have tightened the plot and made it feel less like a travelogue.

As a thought experiment, I have played a lot of living D&D campaigns with a ton of GMs of all types of quality. I thought to myself, if they had all been told that they had to call combat after three rounds, and given some criteria for how to resolve the situation — would it have, on average, made those games more fun?

I really think it would have. I think the weaker GMs would have been spared having to keep grinding away at joyless combats, and the stronger GMs would occasionally have said “I think we can continue this a few more rounds — that OK with you?”, and the games would have been more fun for all!

Which, to me, is the goal.

DMMike said:

Interesting how 4E's combat became a "hassle" in reference to 13th Age!

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Ack. I phrased that poorly. I didn’t mean to imply that I felt combat was a hassle in 4E; what I meant to say was that the 13A provides 90% of the combat fun of 4E, with way less hassle in the supporting system. I’m thinking in particular of the class combos, the huge feat lists, the weapon and item properties and all that stuff to be mastered to get to the combat fun. 13th Age rationalizes and keeps only a few parts of that, dramatically trimming the stuff you need to know so you can get to the fun part without being the sort of person who actually enjoys spending 5 hours working out what powers and feats to take and what to retrain when I level.