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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Galloglaich" data-source="post: 4752564" data-attributes="member: 77019">I agree with this POV on gaming, I think the rules should be in the background. But my problem is that DnD combat is too often based on waiting for your turn and then just saying “I swing my sword” over and over, which gets really boring. People should not have to say “I move two squares, turn on my healing surge, move another square to get a flanking attack, and focus three levels of my barbarian cleaving rage strike power on him” just to be able to get in a fight in the game. This is the kind of thing IMO that weeds out all of the girlfriends, buddies from work, poker night friends etc. from joining your RPG game (or staying in it after one session). But they should be able to say things like “I’m going to wait until he takes a swing at bob and then try to nail him” or "I grab the brazier and fling the coals all over him, then run him through before he can get it togeher!” or “I fall back and try to fend off his attacks” or “I put all my might into one great swing of my axe” or "I try to shoot an arrow into dragons soft underbelly” or “I run halfway up the stairs and jump on the orcs back while he is fighting with suzy” or even “I am going to wait for him take a swing at me and then rush him after his sword goes by and try to get him with my dagger” ” etc. etc. A good system should be able to handle these options that a real person might come up with based on normal general knowledge, real world experiences, from ideas they get from watching movies or even knowledge of history or martial arts. I also personally think it should reward innovative tactical ideas from players, so they can get more into it if they like without having to metagame the rules. I don’t think this has to be detailed or complex either, but you do have to start with an understanding of real-world physics and / or history for it to flow seamlessly. If you start with a realistic model of the world, then you can pick your preferred level of abstraction. So for example, today lots of people understand how modern firearms actually work, unlike say 20 or 30 years ago. Rates of fire, controllability at full auto, jamming, effective ranges, penetration of armor, different types of wounds and ballistic effects are fairly easy to research and quantify. So as a result, both in computer games and RPGs, we have many games which are based on some kind of modern weaponry that are fairly realistic, whether they are very very detailed down to each individual bullet like in the old Twilight 2000, or fairly abstract and fast-paced like say, Shadowrun. In both cases the fight has a realistic feel. In both cases, the player can describe their actions naturalistically “I shoot the bastard in the face” and then the rules can handle what happens in game terms. The problem is this doesn’t work for quasi-Medieval settings like in DnD, because people don’t even begin to understand European Medieval History, or how even basic widely known European kit worked, let alone the subtleties of Medieval Martial Arts. So they make up systems based on the idea that swords weighed ten pounds, you can cut through armor, weapons and armor are supposed to have spikes and wings and stingers on them, shields look like iron manhole covers, war hammers are two feet wide and etc. and etc. This creates such a muddle they can’t begin to imagine how to differentiate from one basic medieval weapon to another, leading to the point where many RPGs today like Warhammer FRPG (which I kind of like mind you) just give up on differentiating them at all, and make a general class for single handed weapons, lumping swords, maces, axes, hammers etc. together. And of course the poor dagger ends up the red-headed stepchild of every RPG <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> But with the rediscovery of the Lichtenauer et al fencing manuals in the 1990s and the subsequent rise of Historical European Martial Arts, this is no longer necessary. Numerous excellent online resources do exist now if game designers are willing to do the research; for martial arts, for weapons, for armor, for Medieval, Renaissance, "Dark Ages" or Classical era life in general. And if you base your system (and your world) on something real, you will find that it all fits together much more smoothly than before, and you can make a game that works in the background but handles things like combat without having to resort to Theater group style “Fiat”, which not everybody is comfortable with (though that is also a reasonable way to play if you like that kind of game). You'll have a system that you can much more easily add things to, adjust, and play around with without having it break so easily or begin to accumulate rules like barnacles on the belly of a ship. What I really don’t like personally are serious (as opposed to inentionally humorous) games that require have to buy into a lot of Geek culture just to begin to play, I think that is ok for specialized or niche games but that is a real problem to me in a “mainstream” let alone a “gateway” game. G.</blockquote>

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