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Boss Monsters? I Just Say No!
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7758157" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>I don't agree with your "has become" - action economy was an issue from the beginning.</p><p></p><p>The action economy issue can be reduced in systems that (1) use "active" defence, and (2) don't ration that defence. Maverl Heroic RP/Cortex+ Heroic is one example.</p><p></p><p>I'll leave the debate about the origins of the trope to others. But in the RPG context, I think it's partly about framing but to a significant extent about system. D&D generates a strong degree of pressure to have combat as climax because the system allows for the most amount of player decision-making that will clearly impact the fiction in the realm of combat.</p><p></p><p>When I think about some climactic moments in other systems I've run, they've sometimes involved combat - eg in Classic Traveller, in Marvel Heroic, in Cortex+ Heroic Fantasy - but sometimes other things: the first arc of my Burning Wheel game climaxed with a race against time to try and save a sibling from assassination; my second big Rolemaster campaign ended with the PCs tricking a fallen Lord of Karma into creating a karmic simulacrum to take a hero's place in the karmic cycle, freeing that hero and establishing a new bulwark against the evil that was trying to enter the world from outside; in two sessions of Prince Valiant one ended with a PC being run down by the Wild Hunt, the other with a PC winning an argument in a trial; a Cthulhu Dark session ended with the PCs crashing a cargo ship into some rocks to sink it and its cargo.</p><p></p><p>In all these cases, the system didn't privilege combat as a mode of resolving conflicts and establishing finality in results.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 7758157, member: 42582"] I don't agree with your "has become" - action economy was an issue from the beginning. The action economy issue can be reduced in systems that (1) use "active" defence, and (2) don't ration that defence. Maverl Heroic RP/Cortex+ Heroic is one example. I'll leave the debate about the origins of the trope to others. But in the RPG context, I think it's partly about framing but to a significant extent about system. D&D generates a strong degree of pressure to have combat as climax because the system allows for the most amount of player decision-making that will clearly impact the fiction in the realm of combat. When I think about some climactic moments in other systems I've run, they've sometimes involved combat - eg in Classic Traveller, in Marvel Heroic, in Cortex+ Heroic Fantasy - but sometimes other things: the first arc of my Burning Wheel game climaxed with a race against time to try and save a sibling from assassination; my second big Rolemaster campaign ended with the PCs tricking a fallen Lord of Karma into creating a karmic simulacrum to take a hero's place in the karmic cycle, freeing that hero and establishing a new bulwark against the evil that was trying to enter the world from outside; in two sessions of Prince Valiant one ended with a PC being run down by the Wild Hunt, the other with a PC winning an argument in a trial; a Cthulhu Dark session ended with the PCs crashing a cargo ship into some rocks to sink it and its cargo. In all these cases, the system didn't privilege combat as a mode of resolving conflicts and establishing finality in results. [/QUOTE]
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