Challenging Combat?

[I'm A Banana]

Up on ye olde blogge, I did some rampant questioning about what the heck Combat in a heroic fantasy game was really for, given the likelihood of heroes being heroic and winning in most heroic fantasy games.

But I started off talking about a problem I was facing with FFZ, that I think the folks here can help me with.

Namely, the problem is this:

How can I make combat challenging, without rendering PC's unconscious?

"Challenging" in the sense that it is something that they could loose -- that they could get a TPK during.

Alternately, is that a level of challenge that is even desirable? Do you want to risk a TPK (even a 30% or 20% chance) any time you get into a combat? Without that possibility (and given that you essentially get free resurrection after combat), can combat be challenging? Should every combat be that challenging?

I'm trying to keep the PC's alive, so that they can participate, but still make combat a round-to-round, nail-biting, gotta-pay-attention tension.

Is that even possible?

Anyway, help me out, or talk about the blog, or whatever...hoping to stir up some interesting thoughts on this.

 

[fuzzlewump]

I'm no game designer, but I've found that 'swinginess' in combats gives you the edge of your seat action that you desire. Let me bring up one of my favorite video game series, the 'Mother' series called EarthBound here in the states. The second and third games featured a sort of scrolling HP meter, so that even when you were 'killed' in a single hit, you had until your HP scrolled down to 0 to react or kill your opponent first.

What I am saying is that allowing the dying character a final turn to either heal or make one last fatal attempt to kill his opponent could be the answer to make a combat seem challenging but not have 1-hit kills which are the bane of swingy combats.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

What is combat for? I'd say it's part of the fun. Just like a good roleplay session or mystery or puzzle is part of the fun. Different amounts of each for different groups/players of course.

As to how deadly combat should be... well that depends on the group really. Some people hate losing characters, others think dying spectacularly is a high point.

But presumably you want an answer that might help you. So I'd say mix it up. Some fights should be cake walks, some should be skin of the teeth affairs. The law of drama would suggest that the higher the stakes the tougher the fight. This latter can be supported with in-game reasons. eg: the PC's must stop the McGuffin to End the World but the Baddie wants it to succeed at all cost so puts the most/toughest guards on it. When the PC's finally reach it, at the climax of the adventure, they get the toughest fight of the campiagn yet. But it doesn't have to: you can throw tougher/easier fights in where ever you think they work.

How to deal with the problem of bored players? Well in my experience most players will watch the combat with interest even after their character gets knocked out. (In between wandering off for munchies, coffee, toilet breaks, etc.) But if there are problems the GM should find a way to speed up the combats. Or bring the players back into the game. Maybe give them an NPC to run; get their PC up and moving somehow (encourage the other PCs to do it if it doesn't occur to them.) Somewhere on the forums recently some wrote that the GM's energy is essential to keeping up the energy of the players. I agree whole-heartedly with this.

just a few thoughts.

cheers.

 

[Cor_Malek]

Um... Well it seems we do have a conundrum - challenging combat when nothing is at stake.

Note, that I really don't know which of the propositions I'm suggesting would be fun - half of those piss me off, but then again I like epic battles after which DM is surprised we managed to win - so there might be a dissonance ;-)

• Escort. Preferably a herd of cows, maybe a group of pilgrims/settlers. The goal is not simply to defeat your enemies, but to save as many of yours as you can (pick off 1 or 2 every now and then to show you mean business).
• Timechase. The badguys are not sent at them to prevail - but to slow them down long enough for X to finish Z. If they take naps in between and call "5" every time something jumps them - then all they're gonna see will be orcus mooning them on his way to their hometown.
• Taking prisoners. It's a piss to kill someone? How about when they're supposed to take tongue? A good situation to let eladrins or leaders in party to shine (to quickly get to target).
• Goddamn cowards - whenever it gets hot, their enemies look for a window to run away. PC's have to make sure that no one will be able to escape the slaughter.
• Fragile environment. Scaffoldings, palace gardens - you name it. This one can be disproportionally harsh on controllers though (but then again, an ice themed one could shine).
• Unarmed, improvised weapons ftw! They can take some crappy swords off first defeated enemies, but it should throw them of the comfort zone for a bit.

 

[FireLance]

Is that even possible?

Some statistics and thoughts based on a bit of number crunching that I did:

Assuming a party of PCs fights 300 combats over the course of a campaign (say, 10 fights per level for 30 levels), the PCs must have about a 99.77% chance of surviving each fight to have a 50% chance of surviving to the end of the campaign.

However, assuming a party of 5 PCs, and assuming the party survives if at least one PC ends the fight with positive hit points, and each PC's chance of ending the fight with positive hit points is independent from the rest (the last is particularly questionable, but bear with me), the chance of each individual PC ending the fight with positive hit points can go as low as 70.31% in order for the party to have an overall survival chance of 99.77%.

Hence, given the above set-up, even though the party as a whole will survive an encounter 99.77% of the time, and has about a 97.72% chance of surviving each level, on average, each PC will end up unconscious in 3 out of the 10 fights required to gain that level, and each fight will end with one or two PCs unconscious.

On the basis of the (admittedly fairly questionable) assumptions above, I would draw the somewhat broad and obvious conclusion that a party of adventurers is more durable than its individual component PCs. A fight can thus seem challenging at the individual PC level (since each has a 30% chance of ending the fight unconscious) without a significant risk of a TPK (since the party as a whole has a 99.77% chance of survival.

As a further, interesting point, decreasing the PC KO rate to 20% increases the party survival rate to 99.97% per encounter, and to 90.85% after a campaign of 300 fights. So, individual PCs can go unconscious 20% of the time (and each fight will end with an average of one PC unconscious), and the party still has a 90% chance of surviving till the end of the campaign.

 

[steenan]

Cor Malek hit the nail on the head.

If the only stake of a combat is if PCs die or not, it's impossible to make the fight challenging without risking knocking them out or killing them. The range of difficulty where the fights are meaningful (may be lost) but characters don't die every other session is narrow to nonexistent. If there is a risk of death, people die sometimes.

But when you have something else than just PC lives that is important, it's possible to lose without being killed. In this case, it's the danger of losing the stake that makes the fight challenging, not the risk of dying. Thus, one may push the PCs to the limit without knocking them unconscious or dead.

One crucial thing to remember: if combats (or any other type of conflict) are to be challenging, PCs need to lose sometimes. It does not need to be a total defeat, but something must be lost, there must be a lasting negative consequence. Without it, no GM skill and no game mechanics will create the feel of challenge. If you always win, you get accustomed to winning and take it for granted.

 

[ExploderWizard]

One crucial thing to remember: if combats (or any other type of conflict) are to be challenging, PCs need to lose sometimes. It does not need to be a total defeat, but something must be lost, there must be a lasting negative consequence. Without it, no GM skill and no game mechanics will create the feel of challenge. If you always win, you get accustomed to winning and take it for granted.

This is important.

If a large portion of the game involves combat then losing needs to be a real possibility or a big chunk of the whole game is not actually challenging.

If winning is a given then simply narrate it and move on. Save the mechanics for the actual play involving stakes, and risk.

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

• Timechase. The badguys are not sent at them to prevail - but to slow them down long enough for X to finish Z. If they take naps in between and call "5" every time something jumps them - then all they're gonna see will be orcus mooning them on his way to their hometown.

The Timechase idea above seems to be on a more macro scale of the adventure, but another way to make an individual combat more of a nail-biter is to bring this down to the encounter level. The encounter can have clear time limits to them or "Bad Things" will happen. It could be the arrival of reinforcements, completion of a ritual, escape with the macguffin or the sounding of an alarm that will put everyone else on high alert the rest of the adventure.

As with anything, you don't want to overuse it. If you ramp everything up to eleven, then eleven just becomes the new normal.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Thanks for the responses, everyone!

Note, that I really don't know which of the propositions I'm suggesting would be fun - half of those piss me off, but then again I like epic battles after which DM is surprised we managed to win - so there might be a dissonance

But when you have something else than just PC lives that is important, it's possible to lose without being killed.

These are interesting, but kind of situational. They're good in a big combat or two, but if something like this happened every time you got in a fight, I imagine it'd be frustrating.

FFZ does a pretty good job of situating the combat in an ongoing plot, so there's stuff at stake, but that doesn't speak to how difficult an individual combat should or shouldn't be.

Assuming a party of PCs fights 300 combats over the course of a campaign (say, 10 fights per level for 30 levels), the PCs must have about a 99.77% chance of surviving each fight to have a 50% chance of surviving to the end of the campaign.

Huh. If the PC's are 99+% likely to survive each fight, doesn't that mean that they're 99+% likely to survive the length of the campaign? Because the effects are isolated in each combat? Like, if you have a kid who is a boy, and then have a second kid, the probability of that second kid being a boy is still about 50%. Or, if you toss a coin twice, and it comes up heads the first time, it's still about 50% likely to come up heads a second time?

In other words, when this is playing out at the table, if each combat is so nearly an assured victory, why do we bother resolving that conflict? There doesn't seem to be much conflict, really, to resolve: the party wins, and the game keeps going.

Which seems to make combat kind of pointless, as a "game system" or "task resolution" at least (though it still could be fun as part of the ongoing interactive story).

...like EW said:

If a large portion of the game involves combat then losing needs to be a real possibility or a big chunk of the whole game is not actually challenging.

If winning is a given then simply narrate it and move on. Save the mechanics for the actual play involving stakes, and risk.

I certainly want combat to be a challenge, but what, really, do we mean by that? What's challenging? 99.77% chance of success doesn't seem very challenging. But a 50% chance of success does seem fair, at least on the surface of it. However, it's true that D&D usually has a much higher survival rate than that, too, regardless of editions.

Hence, given the above set-up, even though the party as a whole will survive an encounter 99.77% of the time, and has about a 97.72% chance of surviving each level, on average, each PC will end up unconscious in 3 out of the 10 fights required to gain that level, and each fight will end with one or two PCs unconscious.

This is pretty close to what's happening right now with my FFZ work, only the chances are skewed for certain characters: some folks (notably, those melee fighters with light defenses) wind up dead in a fight more often than others (in part, because they're delightful targets). This is what took me off in the direction of figuring out things for KO'd characters to do, but I think it's a little more fundamental of a problem then that, and I'm not sure how best to solve it.

What makes a given combat a challenge, if you're expected to win it as a team? Is it the chance that your own character might be KO'd? And if it is, how do I keep players engaged if their characters are winding up unconscious early and often?

 

[FireLance]

THuh. If the PC's are 99+% likely to survive each fight, doesn't that mean that they're 99+% likely to survive the length of the campaign? Because the effects are isolated in each combat? Like, if you have a kid who is a boy, and then have a second kid, the probability of that second kid being a boy is still about 50%. Or, if you toss a coin twice, and it comes up heads the first time, it's still about 50% likely to come up heads a second time?

I'm leaving the house shortly, but I'll just address this quickly. Surviving to the end of the campaign is like getting 300 boys. Even if the party is 99+% likely to surivive each fight, they have to keep on surviving fights or it will be a TPK and the campaign is over.