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Combat thesaurus (or 101 ways to say "You hit for 3 damage")
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6391831" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>You can describe hits all you like, but in general its not really worth it. No matter how vast your vocabulary, you'll quickly exhaust it and worse, you are giving the player exactly no new information by describing an abstract hit nor is the player giving you any new information by describing how he attacks. It's very quickly just meaningless gibber taking up bandwidth.</p><p></p><p>So many systems want to prioritize highly narrated 'cinematic' combat scenes. I often get the feeling that they are written by people who read more RPG books than they actually play. I want to grab them and shake them and go, "Did you actually play your system before trying to sell it? For how long? Four hours? Eight hours if we are lucky?"</p><p></p><p>Tolkien doesn't bother to narrate combat (much). Neither should you. Mostly he just writes, "There was a terrible conflict.", gives the reader a few tidbits about how well it went for different characters ("Sam failed to completely duck a sword blade, and had a nasty gash in his scalp in consequence, but his eyes were shining. He had killed his first orc.") and then gets on with the story. If you actually bothered to record your session and novelize your IC statements, you'd find that all that time spent turning, "14 damage", into whatever IC statement you like, didn't for the most part make the story read better. Novelized action text when it is well done almost never relies on every individual cut thrust and parry being described. Shakespeare generally just wrote: 'they fight' He well understood that what works visually doesn't work on paper. Burroughs and Jordan likewise use similar techniques to Tolkien, even though they have a more RPG like emphasis on combat situations. </p><p></p><p>In short, just don't go there. It's fine to use a bit of color to convey information to the characters in game they wouldn't already have: "The <whatever> is staggered from the blow.", "One more deep blow from Sir Gorenthar prove too much for the beast. It lets out a mighty sigh and collapses onto the blood slippery floor like a falling timber. With a shudder it ceases to move entirely." or even, "You sword pierces his armor between his curraise and his faulds, grievously wound him. He seems stunned that you have landed such a telling blow, and screams out, "You'll not buy the rest of my blood so cheaply." But otherwise if narrating something back to them tells them nothing they didn't know themselves by saying, "14 damage", you are wasting game time.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 6391831, member: 4937"] You can describe hits all you like, but in general its not really worth it. No matter how vast your vocabulary, you'll quickly exhaust it and worse, you are giving the player exactly no new information by describing an abstract hit nor is the player giving you any new information by describing how he attacks. It's very quickly just meaningless gibber taking up bandwidth. So many systems want to prioritize highly narrated 'cinematic' combat scenes. I often get the feeling that they are written by people who read more RPG books than they actually play. I want to grab them and shake them and go, "Did you actually play your system before trying to sell it? For how long? Four hours? Eight hours if we are lucky?" Tolkien doesn't bother to narrate combat (much). Neither should you. Mostly he just writes, "There was a terrible conflict.", gives the reader a few tidbits about how well it went for different characters ("Sam failed to completely duck a sword blade, and had a nasty gash in his scalp in consequence, but his eyes were shining. He had killed his first orc.") and then gets on with the story. If you actually bothered to record your session and novelize your IC statements, you'd find that all that time spent turning, "14 damage", into whatever IC statement you like, didn't for the most part make the story read better. Novelized action text when it is well done almost never relies on every individual cut thrust and parry being described. Shakespeare generally just wrote: 'they fight' He well understood that what works visually doesn't work on paper. Burroughs and Jordan likewise use similar techniques to Tolkien, even though they have a more RPG like emphasis on combat situations. In short, just don't go there. It's fine to use a bit of color to convey information to the characters in game they wouldn't already have: "The <whatever> is staggered from the blow.", "One more deep blow from Sir Gorenthar prove too much for the beast. It lets out a mighty sigh and collapses onto the blood slippery floor like a falling timber. With a shudder it ceases to move entirely." or even, "You sword pierces his armor between his curraise and his faulds, grievously wound him. He seems stunned that you have landed such a telling blow, and screams out, "You'll not buy the rest of my blood so cheaply." But otherwise if narrating something back to them tells them nothing they didn't know themselves by saying, "14 damage", you are wasting game time. [/QUOTE]
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