Realistic Combat that's Simple(ish)

[Thomas Shey]

In fantasy hero, I had one PC who was speed 8 (when the magic was on).

I never found a 7 that much of an issue when everyone else was SPD 5-6

 

[Thomas Shey]

Which makes the game aspect complete fail - the even pace is for fairness. "So, Mrs. Lincoln, aside from that, how was the play?"

There were also some timing things in Hero about active defenses like Dodge and Block that I can't help but think would get--odd.

 

[mmadsen]

Other games use different tools, like fame and fortune points, going back to Top Secret.

Fame and Fortune Points are on the short list of things I remember from Top Secret:

When a character is generated the Admin will secretly roll a 10-sided die; the result is the number of Fortune points (or "luck") the agent will have in his or her career. In a life-or-death situation the agent may expend one fortune point to reduce a fatal wound to the point where the agent still has one Life Level point remaining.

[…]

Fortune points can never be regenerated or replaced — once they are used, they are gone forever, and every espionage agent fears the day that his or her luck will run out! The problem is that the agent doesn't know that
he or she is out of luck until it's too late…

Fame points are used exactly the same way Fortune points are, but Fame points are a factor of how successful the agent is. One Fame point is received for each level the agent has obtained; a first level agent has one Fame point, a fourth level agent will have gained four Fame points, etc. Fame points may be accumulated — thus, a third level agent who hasn't used any Fame points would have three available. Each agent knows how many Fame points are available to him or her. Agents may choose whether to call on Fame or Fortune points when necessary.​

 

[aramis erak]

There were also some timing things in Hero about active defenses like Dodge and Block that I can't help but think would get--odd.

Yeah. gets odd anytime you mess with the chart, but if you guarantee that they get their slots, just not when, it's not too bad.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yeah. gets odd anytime you mess with the chart, but if you guarantee that they get their slots, just not when, it's not too bad.

Uhm, "when" matters a fair bit with some of those, at least regarding sequence if not precisely which when. There are some martial arts/fencing combos that can be made to work well by timing Blocks and strikes that if you don't know when you're going to get them would be, at best, significantly harder to make work.

 

[rmcoen]

No I hadn't, but his conclusions are really close to the numbers I'm using in my 3e homebrew, albeit I have more range increments. Of course, the real ranged increments probably vary rather than are linear increments, but I'm not actually trying to be realistic just "casually realistic" in as much as the results are in line with casual expectations. As such, I don't deal with trying to figure out from the data how much velocity a longbow shaft loses over the course of its flight and corresponding losses of penetration (which in D&D would affect both 'to hit' versus AC and expected damage). Things like that would probably require me to renormalize damage to deal with the actual shearing force of a weapon and whether it could cut cloth and skin, and so on and so forth. And that's before we get into the problem that "damage" effects would need to be dealt with as a combination of pushing force (does it knock you down), pain (does it stimulate your nerves), and tissue destruction (how many arteries/capillaries ect. are severed) since the real killing things are shock and blood loss and infection. We'd have to actually deal with the real trauma response of bodies. Whose got time for that?

Huh, this response just had me off-the-cuff think about introducing a ranged damage modifier: "Disadvantage on Damage" at Long Range. Currently, the archer-types - in my game at least - don't much care if they are shooting at Long Range; they have Advantage from Steady Aim, or stealth, or faerie fire or or or... and frequently multiple of the above. And even if they do have to roll at Disad, they hit anyway. Having their d8 damage shifted down a step because of the "loss of penetration" relevance would be a nice simple thing to tweak. (Ultimately, probably simpler to just say "-2 damage" and avoid the roll, but scale matters when it's not a d8 arrow but a 3d10 boulder or something.)

 

[rmcoen]

Yeah I was going to say something along those lines. There's "realistic combat" and then there's "realistic consequences for behavior in combat that is fun to watch/imagine".

I don't really want either in my movies, with maybe occasional exceptions.

Or in my RPGs.

"Wait, you want me to go into this dark hole in the ground, even though vampires and dragons and neo-otyughs are real? Yeah, I don't think so...."

That's "why" adventurers are rare, despite the fabulous riches they can achieve in a short amount of time. (a) You need to be a little "touched in the head", and (b) most adventurers die.

I mean, even being one of a dozen caravan guards has got to be literally one of the worst trash jobs you can take. Are you really going to prioritize the merchant's goods over your own life when an enraged owlbear comes charging out of the woods for a snack?

 

[Celebrim]

Huh, this response just had me off-the-cuff think about introducing a ranged damage modifier: "Disadvantage on Damage" at Long Range. Currently, the archer-types - in my game at least - don't much care if they are shooting at Long Range; they have Advantage from Steady Aim, or stealth, or faerie fire or or or... and frequently multiple of the above. And even if they do have to roll at Disad, they hit anyway. Having their d8 damage shifted down a step because of the "loss of penetration" relevance would be a nice simple thing to tweak. (Ultimately, probably simpler to just say "-2 damage" and avoid the roll, but scale matters when it's not a d8 arrow but a 3d10 boulder or something.)

You definitely could, though 3e's more granular "to hit" mechanism and lack of boundness means it's not as much of a problem, since at maximum range you are dealing with like -18 to hit, a bigger realism problem is probably the relatively high number of hits an unskilled archer would get from that distance (since 20 always hits). You can however of course squint in most cases by treating this as area attacks from volley fire - if arrows are hitting all around, some are likely to find you.

The real reason though that I don't bother applying disadvantage to damage beyond 5 range increments or something (I run 3e) is that IME the random size of damage dice mostly only matters at low level. The difference between ~2 average damage and about 3.5 average damage is pretty big, but the difference between 7 average damage or 8.5 damage isn't that big. In the long run D&D weapon attack damage depends on the bonuses more than the size of the die.

 

[Celebrim]

I mean, even being one of a dozen caravan guards has got to be literally one of the worst trash jobs you can take. Are you really going to prioritize the merchant's goods over your own life when an enraged owlbear comes charging out of the woods for a snack?

My take on this is that the implication is that an owlbear or other common to the "realm" predator doesn't stand a much of a chance against 12 caravan guards, and consequently hungry owlbears don't generally try to snack on groups of humanoids in broad daylight.

One of the general rules I have for my campaign world is that if the problem is common enough to be ordinary, the NPCs have solved it on a cultural level. NPC competency sufficient to survive in the implied setting is always assumed. NPCs are never surprised by things that are ordinary in the setting like the use of low-level magic, common magical creatures, common undead, or so forth. They fear these things, but precisely because they fear them they are armed to the teeth against them. It's a society geared to the idea, "These tricky mages might use charm person, illusions, or invisibility to try to scam us" and "Any day now we could have a zombie apocalypse."

 

[rmcoen]

These are not actually entirely mutually exclusive. You can have the core system be relatively realistic, but provide a metacurrency that allows PCs and selective NPCs to put their thumbs on the scale. That's essentially the tact that Savage Worlds and a few others do.

This. For example, D&D monsters "die" at 0hp, while characters have Death Saves (or negative hp, depending on the edition). Many systems have Hero/Fate/Luck/Inspiration/Toon points, too, which maybe only Boss Monsters share, which mitigates bad luck or fatal injury.

Thus the 7hp goblin takes 7hp and "dies", while the 7hp PC wizard takes 13, and "goes down"; the 10hp rogue takes a 32pt critical hit from the ogre, and uses an Inspiration to trigger Uncanny Dodge an extra time, reducing it to a 16pt hit that doesn't quite kill him.