Combat as a single roll

[aramis erak]

Rather than have an entire set of rules with armor and hit points and attack rolls and movement and stuff, I was musing over the idea of combat being just a single roll. The loser is defeated.

It would need to be in a rules-lite game, and one which doesn't have a combat focus. And defeat would have to be defined as not necessarily being death - it could be surrender, KO, fleeing, etc.

Conceptually it's easy to say, of course; in practice there would be challenges to making such a system. But it would certainly help those who find combat in RPGs a bit on the boring side. A fight is no more involved than picking a lock or climbing a wall.

It does mean PCs might lose very quickly though. Needs thought!

Standard option in Burning Wheel.

useful, doesn't need to be rules light. Definitely not for everyone, and even for most fans, one occasionally wants more depth.

 

[1of3]

What about games where everything is at most a single roll? The Pool. Primetime Adventures. It's not like these are new ideas.

 

[Tun Kai Poh]

A one-roll combat could mean that you could spend twenty minutes slicing through a horde of orcs (the ones with equal capabilities and temperaments to elves, dwarves, and humans, of course) instead of spending four hours fighting that horde. One opponent, one roll.

For reference, here's how long it would take Boromir:

Boromir Death Simulator

This reminds me of Bleys fighting endless waves of troops in a narrow stair up a mountain, one at a time, in Nine Princes in Amber:

"For half an hour I watched him, and they died and they died."

That's either a one-roll action, or no roll at all (it's an actual example in the Amber Diceless RPG).

 

[Nytmare]

Just remembered that Everway had a combat via single (not) roll system. It's been a long time since I cracked open that rulebook, but it was essentially a game whose RNG was a modified tarot deck and the outcome of conflicts were figured out by either a single, or three card tarot reading.

Granted this was also an RPG where every character had some kind of innate magical ability and "Can not die" was a example thrown right out there in the middle of everything for everyone to see.

 

[Crumbling Keep]

It goes even further, really. With Blades, you may resolve a PC dealing with a specific target (or at times, maybe multiple targets) with one roll, but the entire combat may consist of multiple targets or enemies, and would therefore potentially involve multiple rolls by all players.

Agon is specifically about deciding which PCs are getting involved in the challenge, making a roll for each of them, then comparing them to to Strife Score to see if they succeed and who might gain the most glory.

There are certainly multiple challenges on each island, but every single challenge follows the above play summary, with each participating PC making one roll.

The more I hear about this game, the more I feel I need it, at least from a design perspective. It seems to do a lot of unique things, yeah?

 

[Crumbling Keep]

In 5e I will include combats that are narrative only, but that cost the players some resources. I do this to try to fix the "what is the point of a wandering monster on the road if its the only encounter all day" problem I have.

So, for example, I might tell the players that between breakfast and lunch they were waylaid on the road by a group of bandits. They won the battle, but each player need to mark off 2 Hit Die for the encounter, or instead 1 HD and each spellcaster marks off a 2nd and a 1st level spell.

Now that I think about it....this system might be ripe for more intense development and sharing...hmm....

Do the players ever feel slighted by this? Like, do they have the complaint that they could have fought it out better?

 

[JiffyPopTart]

Do the players ever feel slighted by this? Like, do they have the complaint that they could have fought it out better?

If they have felt this way, they never have said anything about it. As mentioned in my post, the alternative is to either

1. Take up table time with meaningless battles that do not advance the plot nor have an impact on the next encounter (everything comes back on a long rest).

2. Make every wandering monster encounter be potentially deadly, which impacts the "realness" of the world and is unfair to the players.

Note that the method I describe is something I use almost exclusively when the players are in between adventures and "on the road", not during the adventure proper. By taxing some things narratively, I can set up scenes later that have greater impact than what their CR would normally cause.

For example.....lets say you have a group of four 10th level characters going overland to the lost temple. You could have a drawn out scene of them climbing a cliff (if this was appropriate for your mood and tempo) or you could explain how the early morning through the mountains was extra taxing and each players loses a HD representing a particularly difficult cliff climb. Later you can narratively have them encounter a swampy valley with a swarm of stirges and offer them the choice of going around (another HD for the forced march) or wading through and fighting (making the spellcasters use up a couple appropriate spells or daily use items to get through). Still later you can describe how they rested in field of strange flowers that had intoxicating effects (Exhaustion or 2 HD or a spell per person). Finally, at the end of the day you can have them camped and ready for bed when the mountain orcs attack and have a proper combat.

If you were to roleplay out each of those encounters normally, this day of travel might cost you an hour or two of tabletime for one day of a 3 week journey. If you did this narratively you can do the entire day in the time it takes to do the orc battle (which is now a little dangerous due to the fact the players are a bit short on resources). This tool allows you to have some "exciting" travel days in those 3 weeks of travel, but not actually force you to take up the entire session to make those combat encounters have some weight behind them.

 

[TheSword]

If you wanted to make it nuanced you could have degrees of failure for the single role replicating different outcomes.

if combats are largely against NPCs and monsters rather than a PC like stat block you could just have enemies represented by a DC to remove some of the swinginess of am opposed roll.

 

[wagonicfolding]

Fate actually more or less works like this. An alternate to 4dF is 1d6-1d6 which has the same range as 2d6 but centered around zero. Damage is margin of success. On a tie (which are fairly frequent) the attacker gets a boost to their next attack. Defender succeeding by 3 gives them a boost to their next attack. The attacker succeeding by 3 or more allows them to reduce damage but inflict an additional status effect. Some stunts also trigger off of succeeding by 3 or more on an attack or defense, which also help spice up combat a bit.

Additional advantages to how Fate does it is that since rolls are centered around zero, you don't have to roll for both sides. You could do player only rolls, just taking the skill value for enemy attacks and defense. The dice margin is pretty narrow so it doesn't accommodate a lot of modifiers very well. You might want to go with an advantage/disadvantage mechanic to not inflate numbers.

 

[hawkeyefan]

The more I hear about this game, the more I feel I need it, at least from a design perspective. It seems to do a lot of unique things, yeah?

Agon is interesting. I’ve only played a couple of times, but it was very different than a “standard” RPG experience, yeah. Very narrative. Few rolls each with high stakes rather than frequent rolls with significantly lower stakes. A bit of a competitive angle among players to try to obtain the most glory. It’s very episodic in that each session should be a complete “adventure”, meaning an island you arrive at and find some sort of problem to solve before heading back on your journey, very much like the Odyssey and similar myths.

Blades is more complex in that it has multiple components for the modes of play that all fit together and inform each other in interesting ways. It gives players a lot of resources to determine how the story goes, and constrains the GM’s authority in specific ways. It eliminates the need for a lot of prep on the part of the GM and instead lets the PCs pursue their own agenda. Rolls are more frequent than Agon, but no where near as frequent as a game like D&D, so each roll still has a strong sense of weight to it.

Sorry, I wasn’t sure if you meant Agon or Blades in the Dark, so I answered for both. I recommend each.