How important is combat?

[MichaelSomething]

Look at your character sheet, your D&D book shelf, and your past memories of D&D games. Did your character get married? Go to a wedding? Did your character ever host a party? Does your character have abilities that would be good for hosting a party?

How many orcs did your character kill? Does your character has a magic sword or a decanter of water? Does your books shelf have books that provide combat feats? Do you have D&D books about castle building, kingdom management?

 

[pemerton]

It's almost a paradox:

Combat rules are the most important rules in the game because roleplaying doesn't need any rules to work right.

This is also very contentious.

For example: in a game without climbing mechanics, how does my guy climb a wall? The GM describes the wall to me, I explain what my guy is doing - what equipment he is using, what training he is relying on, etc - and then I either succeed or I don't, as the GM see appropriate. Or, perhaps, the GM assigns a chance to succeed, and dice are rolled.

Combat could be done in just the same way: the GM describes my guy's opponent, the fearsome jaws and bulging muscles etc, and I explain how mu guy is going to beat that opponent (maybe, Tarzan-style, I'm going to wedge a bit of wood in it's mouth to hold it's jaws open, then wrestle it to the ground with a hold around it's neck). Again, perhaps the GM assigns a chance to succeed (maybe I get a +2 bonus for thinking of the whole mouth-wedge thing) and dice are rolled.

For me, at least, whether I want to resolve conflict through free narration, by GM-heavy crunch-light mechanics, or by the sort of complex mechanics that 4e uses to resolve combat, is not dependent on whether it's combat or "roleplaying". It's about where I want the focus of my game to be (personally, for example, I don't want very crunchy shopping mechanics because I hate GMing shopping trips) and the sort of play experience I want the action resolution rules to deliver.

 

[pemerton]

If you look casually at AE, with its set of classes and race and spells and feats and skills, you might mistake it for a more casual knock-off of 3E. It's only when you play it, I think, that you see what he is talking about in those diaries.

<snip>

Everything that you used to do before, conceptually, you could still do, often better. Who did it, how they did it, how it interacted with everyone else--that was the shock. In some ways, it was more of a shock than 3E to 4E, because 4E telegraphed that it was so different.

I've seen you mention this before. Can you say a bit more about the details?

The nearest comparison I can think of from my own RPGing experience - but the two systems I'm comparing are much further apart - is melee in RQ vs melee in RM. Both involve attacking and parrying - good purist-for-system simulationist stuff. But in RQ attack and parry are seperate skills. In RM, attack and parry are allocated round-to-round from a common pool. At first blush, the RM change looks like just more sensible simulationist stuff - a melee combatant can focus more on attack, or more on defence, as the tide of battle rises and falls. But this one difference opens up a small gap for the metagame wedge - a player can start to metagame, in all sorts of ways and with all sorts of motivations (from expressing one's PC, through to hard-core gaming of the system), their decision about attack/parry split.

So even though RQ and RM are both poster children for purist-for-system simulationist play, I find that this one, seemingly minor, difference makes for a very different play experience (and makes RM driftable in a way that I think RQ really isn't).

Is this anything like the sort of point that you're making?

But how exactly that will look, I can't say. I know Monte did it at least once before, and that Mike understands what he did and repeated some of it in 4E, and I've seen the process work from the inside in other disciplines (e.g. software design).

One of the characteristics of such an approach is that things that used to be bundled together get split, and things that used to be separate get bundled

<snip>

Thus my prediction and expectation that there is a core, critical element recognizable as hit points that will still be there--though perhaps not in the ways that most of use would say today.

I know that is barely less abstract that what went before, but that's the problem with intuition on design.

As someone who has very little intuition on design, that helps. It also reminds me of another post of yours I read today or yesterday - I can't remember on which thread - which talked about 4 of 5 things circling the 5th, and suggested for this to work the 5th thing may itself have to be different, in new and perhaps unexpected ways, from all the other 4.

Am I right in thinking that this hit point reconceptualisation/redesign would be an example of that?

 

[pemerton]

Look at your character sheet, your D&D book shelf, and your past memories of D&D games. Did your character get married? Go to a wedding? Did your character ever host a party? Does your character have abilities that would be good for hosting a party?

How many orcs did your character kill? Does your character has a magic sword or a decanter of water? Does your books shelf have books that provide combat feats? Do you have D&D books about castle building, kingdom management?

This is a good question, but tricky. It in part goes back to CrazyJerome's observation upthread about D&D being a game of action adventure.

I mostly GM rather than play, but the players in my games have wooed lovers, been to parties, attended funerals, etc. But - as befits the action adventure genre - these social events tend to be crashed by monsters that need fighting, or at least attended by enemies and rivals whose machinations must be observed, and thwarted if possible.

Rolemaster PCs tend to have skills that are suitable to such occasions in various way (I've GMed many a PC with cooking skill), because the Rolemaster PC-build rules have varius silo-ing devices to preclude a player spending all of his/her PC's points on core combat and magic abilities. But in my own experience of GMing RM, most of the time such skills serve as colour for the PC, rather than actually being invoked for action resolution.

4e PC's tend not to, or to have very generic skills (Diplomacy, History, Insight etc). The relevant colour is introduced by free narration.

What is the point of this rambling post? To my mind, the key question is not "What sorts of events do my PCs attend?", or even "What sorts of things are my PCs good at?" but rather "What sorts of challenges are my PCs going to confront and overcome?" You can attend as many weddings or host as many parties as you like, but if the real challenge is going to be not the prepration and serving of the hors d'ouevres, but rather dealing with the Orcus cultists who decide to perform a mass sacrifice of all the gifts, then the game doesn't need action resolution mechanics for cooking and serving (although, like RM, it may still want some sort of mechanic for distributing PC colour, rather than leaving it all to free narration as 4e does.)

 

[nnms]

I just saw a quote in a thread where someone said combat occupied 90% of their campaign. This comment jarred me a bit, because in my best campaigns I think we are pushing 20-30% combat. It makes me wonder how it is possible to unify these two play styles.

I think 4e sort of exacerbated the problem my mostly only providing rules for combat and adventures that provided little in non combat challenge (except for the odd skill challenge).

How important is combat in your game, and would you like to see more of a focus for non combat?

Great question.

I want a combat system that I can use when someone at the table describes one character attacking another (with character here including monsters and animals). I want it to resolve the described actions.

I don't want a change in game mode. I don't want to leave the description of character actions mode for a combat mode where we set down a battle map and spend the next 40 minutes playing a tactical wargame with all sorts of abilities and powers with a refresh system tied to entering and exiting this game mode.

Combat is important because in a game of heroic fantasy adventure, some characters are going to fight other characters. But it doesn't have to take up the majority of either the game session time or the pages in the rulebook.

 

[Hassassin]

Look at your character sheet, your D&D book shelf, and your past memories of D&D games. Did your character get married? Go to a wedding? Did your character ever host a party? Does your character have abilities that would be good for hosting a party?

Yes. Yes. Yes (co-host). At least knowledge (nobility), diplomacy and bluff.

How many orcs did your character kill? Does your character has a magic sword or a decanter of water? Does your books shelf have books that provide combat feats? Do you have D&D books about castle building, kingdom management?

Many, probably tens in total. Swords yes, decanters no. Pretty much every 3e book has feats (unfortunately, in the case of e.g. Faiths and Pantheons). Not specifically, but there are bits in some.

Sorry, I'm not sure what the point of this exercise is.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Sorry, I'm not sure what the point of this exercise is.

The point of that point was to make people compare their desires with their actual games. Better yet, look at the 3E OGL market. There are dozen of books full of combat options and they vastly outnumber the books about non combat options. If D&D wasn't about fighting, wouldn't it be the other way around?

 

[Crazy Jerome]

[MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION], on the question of how hit points might change to accommodate different styles, you may be interested in some of the discussion at http://www.enworld.org/forum/new-ho...316380-lethality-i-dont-know-what-i-want.html

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I've seen you mention this before. Can you say a bit more about the details?

The nearest comparison I can think of from my own RPGing experience - but the two systems I'm comparing are much further apart - is melee in RQ vs melee in RM...

Is this anything like the sort of point that you're making?

Sounds very similar, yes. Of course, the "culture shock" is not confined to metagaming, necessarily. In AE, the magister is using a spell system which is practically "shifted out of phase" compared to a 3E wizard. Spells can be diminished or heightened to change their level. Templates can be applied with considerable effects. The feat choices provide access to interesting cross sections of spells, and other such choices. By default, the magister only has proficiency with a staff--no other weapons. And then the bigger, more obvious, change, that all spell casting in AE is a hyrbid of the 3E wizard/sorcerer distinction, with spells "readied" from a larger list each day, but "slots" used for casting picking from the readied list and not commited until then. And a caster can combine and break slots as needed to get more lower level spells or a few higher level ones. In this way, it is a spell point system with sharp limits. Then you have niche things, like situational but more effective counter-spelling options than 3E.

So there are some almost metagaming/build choice in how to set up the cross-section of spells most efficiently--and related, party syngery thoughts for players that want to maximize their access to magic which can be done in character or out. But tactically (in character or out, your choice) there are lots of meaningful decisions that arise every round, and not just in combat. Is the equivalent of "fireball" now the best course, or split that slot up and get multiple, smaller balls of fire over a few rounds? Is one bigger divinition or object lore spell the best way, or several lower ones to get more questions?

Then when you get a good handle on that, you realize that the "akashic" character next to you is fully capable of doing this weird cross section of things that might be described as the backup melee role of the cleric combined with a skill monkey slice of the rogue and some of the utility abilities that the wizard would normally do. And with a few exceptions, most characters in your party are like that.

It also reminds me of another post of yours I read today or yesterday - I can't remember on which thread - which talked about 4 of 5 things circling the 5th, and suggested for this to work the 5th thing may itself have to be different, in new and perhaps unexpected ways, from all the other 4.

Am I right in thinking that this hit point reconceptualisation/redesign would be an example of that?

Yes. Most of the solid things, and more than a few of the goofy things, that were done with hit points in each version, were done for a reason. Each reason is a point on the grid that pulls the center somewhere. A lot of those points might be outside the boundaries if you could draw clear ones around the center, but the outside points still matter even so.

 

[billd91]

The point of that point was to make people compare their desires with their actual games. Better yet, look at the 3E OGL market. There are dozen of books full of combat options and they vastly outnumber the books about non combat options. If D&D wasn't about fighting, wouldn't it be the other way around?

I think you're spending too much time looking at the trees to realize that the forest has a lot more to it.