How to Encourage Melee Combat in a Sci-fi Setting? (5e)

[Fragsie]

So, as some of you may have seen from my other recent threads; I'm developing a sci-fantasy space opera setting for 5e. One of the more 'meta' issues I have rattling around my head is 'why would intergalactic, tech-advanced cultures, with access to all manner of guns, still produce a great number of combatants that rely on swords and other melee weapons?'.

I love the way that Frank Herbert's Dune deals with this; personal shielding exists that is effective against ranged attacks, but not melee attacks. This would create a believable in setting reason as to why melee fighting is still common.

So, in Spirit (the name of the setting) there is a new armour type called 'Fields', that can be worn at the same time as armour and a shield and doesn't require a free hand. To gain the benefit of a field a character must be proficient, though I'm unsure how to handle their use by characters that are not proficient. I toyed with the idea of using the DR/type mechanic of 3.5, but I want the fields to be effective against all ranged and no melee damage rather than against certain damage types. I also felt that just giving a flat resistance to ranged damage would be too powerful and potentially unbalancing. I don't like the idea of fields being totally a reliable technology either.

At the moment I'm most fond of the idea of fields providing the character with a number of 'soak dice' dependant on the cost of the field, that can be rolled whenever hit by a ranged attack, if a certain number is rolled then the character gains resistance against that attack (on a 6 if I were to use d6's), this makes fields effective but unreliable. Though I'm unsure what die to use for soak (d4, d6 etc).

It may be the case that I'm being too complex and fields instead should just offer a flat damage reduction, let me know what you think, I'm open to any discussion/suggestion.

 

[Weathercock]

Well, there are a lot of ways to go about it.

One concept I was playing with for a sci-fi setting that I never actually ended up bringing to play involved most medium-to-heavy infantry armour that was highly resistant to conventional physical impacts. In order to do appreciable damage outside the use of extremely heavy and cumbersome ranged weaponry better fit for vehicular use and fixed positions (in this setting, laser weaponry was confined to giant cannon emplacements), super-heated melee weapons would be the preferred tool of choice. But due to the weight and value of the materials required to produce these blades, and that of the power supplies that actually worked to heat them, small arm projectile weapons would not really work in such a manner. In this case, characters wearing medium and heavy armour would end up having resistance to most physical damage types, but heat-based melee weaponry would end up dealing additional damage of an unresisted type (to balance this, light armoured classes would have had resistance to the setting's equivalent to magic).

Another way to go might be something more environmental in factor. In the Universal Century Gundam timeline, long ranged combat is stifled due to the Minovsky effect, caused by particles dispersed in warzones that cause communications, tracking, and targeting systems to function unreliably over larger distances (being primarily about space combat, these distances would theoretically be quite large), and can cause long range beam weaponry to function strangely. Because of that, combat in that universe tends to be focused in much more medium-to-close quarters based scenarios.
If your setting made use of beam/laser/plasma/etc. style weaponry, or even a heavy reliance on computer assisted targeting systems, you could give characters the ability to disperse fields of particles of a similar fashion, albeit a smaller scale, creating areas where ranged options become more unreliable.

 

[Jediking]

If your setting made use of beam/laser/plasma/etc. style weaponry, or even a heavy reliance on computer assisted targeting systems, you could give characters the ability to disperse fields of particles of a similar fashion, albeit a smaller scale, creating areas where ranged options become more unreliable.

I think Weathercock brings up an easy way of doing it. Look at the weapons your setting has and think of how they are used, and why melee combat isn't preferred. Modern firearms are great at wounding and injuring people. But maybe a plasma rifle kills infantry instantly, or melts through vehicle plates, so no has used projectiles for so long they have been forgotten. Think of how an arm's race progresses: one side carries guns, other side gets bulletproof vests, then armour-piercing bullets, then heavier armour/tanks, up until you have high energy blasts and a dispersing suit. But now it's gone full circle, because a simple Unobtainium knife is able to go through the supersuit (if the person can get close enough).

Another thing to think of it gives guns a drawback. Loading penalties, ammunition, overheating/maintenance, cost, training, availability. The best guns may be only available to the military, and the ones you can get from the black market are prone to jam. Maybe guns have biometric readers that keep it locked unless you crack it. Maybe some for some alien species certain guns/ammunition won't work against, but a solid sword swing always has a good chance to draw blood (or whatever they spill)

For the Fields armour, maybe if the armour takes maximum damage it causes a system failure and causes the user to be stunned or immobile while it recharges. Maybe the Field glows and hums and you can't turn your head all the way around, and going to the bathroom takes forever... and Johnson has been off in the cantine for a while now...

 

[transcendantviewer]

Ranged attack rolls against a target wearing a field generator have Disadvantage. Problem solved. Another easy way to deal with this problem is just say "They're laying prone to take ranged shots at you. You have Disadvantage on ranged attack rolls against them". Or, you can try rebalancing the damage output of the ranged weaponry, make combat scenarios more cramped, requiring melee combat, and even just doing what Lucas did: saying it's all due to tradition and brushing it under the rug.

 

[Creamsteak]

The mechanics already exist in D&D. Spellcasters (and other ranged damage users) have a lot of ranged damage potential. It doesn't invalidate melee. Someone getting into melee usually puts your ranged weapon users at a huge disadvantage. One of the biggest obstacles is simply engagement range. Another obvious thing is that if your enemy fields close combat units, you need to field them as well to give yourself a front line and some breathing room.

This, of course, assumes the rules are structured like D&D at all. I have not been following your discussions on these topics before, so I don't know how much you are changing. If you are increasing the engagement range to miles like some modern weapons... yeah, it becomes increasingly questionable why anyone would pull out a knife. Similarly, with sufficiently advanced AI, it becomes questionable why anyone would actually bring a person to a fight. I don't know enough about your setting and circumstances.

 

[Jediking]

'why would intergalactic, tech-advanced cultures, with access to all manner of guns, still produce a great number of combatants that rely on swords and other melee weapons?'.

Why would dangerous, magic-wielding creatures with access to all manner of spells, still produce a great number of humanoids that rely on swords and other melee weapons?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

why would intergalactic, tech-advanced cultures, with access to all manner of guns, still produce a great number of combatants that rely on swords and other melee weapons?'.

Just off the top of my head, because:

1) some weapons have a minimum effective range.

2) sometimes, you don't want to destroy a target, you need to keep it intact for some reason.

3) sometimes, a weapon is too dangerous to its users in certain environments.

4) RoF vs closing speed- especially in a target-rich environment- may render effective ranged combat risky.

5) portability of power supplies- and the demands put upon them- may affect the utility of ranged combat weapons.

 

[PeterFitz]

In ship-board combat, a miss with a destructo-ray or explodium grenade is inevitably going to damage something else — maybe something important, like life support controls. If it's a culture that uses fields for ship armour, it might even punch right through the hull. In that situation, if you want to keep the ship in as few pieces as possible, melee weapons of some sort might be the safest option.

 

[Celebrim]

I love the way that Frank Herbert's Dune deals with this; personal shielding exists that is effective against ranged attacks, but not melee attacks. This would create a believable in setting reason as to why melee fighting is still common.

I don't know about the believable part. One of the weaknesses I find in Dune (one of my favorite books nonetheless) is that the military aspect of it is so wholly unbelievable and so obviously reliant on the author's intervention to achieve a particular effect. The whole universe uses shield generators which render (magically) you immune to not only missile weapons but apparently the law of conservation of momentum, such that a 155mm artillery shell exploding near you doesn't kill you with sheer concussion. Do shields also protect you from falls of any distance?. Likewise, these shields appear to selectively keep out say napalm (which would you think just drip through them slowly) and shield you from the thermal effects of being coated in it. And why is no one employing gas weapons or fuel air explosives?

In theory all these 'primitive' weapons are obsoleted by advanced energy weapons - lasguns. But all these advanced energy weapons aren't actually employed because they cause nuclear scale explosions when interacting with shields. Which to me says that it's not lasguns that wouldn't be employed, as it was in the books, but shields! If your defensive technology can be 100% sabotaged into a mass self-destruction mechanism 100% reliably just by shooting 1 lasgun at it, then 1000's of years ago that technology would have been abandoned as a crock or at the least been used as a rare special purpose sort of thing in a non-military environment.

And of course, this is exactly how it plays out in the books, with the 'primitive' modern weaponry - artillery, rockets, bombs, machine guns - absolutely wrecking the advanced science fiction stuff - rather like machine guns being more useful against the Borg than phasers, or every second episode of Stargate: SG1. In practice, the melee weapons don't actually have a lot of military practicality even in Dune, and the only time they are really important is as dueling weapons or means of assassination.

At the moment I'm most fond of the idea of fields providing the character with a number of 'soak dice' dependant on the cost of the field, that can be rolled whenever hit by a ranged attack, if a certain number is rolled then the character gains resistance against that attack (on a 6 if I were to use d6's), this makes fields effective but unreliable. Though I'm unsure what die to use for soak (d4, d6 etc).

That's generally one of the more balanced ways of doing armor as DR. Personally, I think armor as DR is a great way to deal with science fiction weaponry and the problems of heroism in an age when offensive weaponry is capable of flattening whole cities. If I was doing this, I'd do rather the reverse of what you are doing. I'd have armor with 'soak dice' against attacks of all sorts, then create special melee weapons ('vibroblades', 'lightsabers', whatever) that had the special property of ignoring all or part of the armor or at least most kinds of armor. Thus, you'd have weapons which weren't necessarily more potent than missile weapons, but which were relatively more effective against armor.

 

[Celebrim]

In ship-board combat, a miss with a destructo-ray or explodium grenade is inevitably going to damage something else...

How often in the modern era do you generally see boarding actions in combat? Ranged weapons have been steadily eroding the importance of melee weapons in naval combat since the High Middle Ages, and by the mid-19th century they (and the bayonet charge on land) were basically obsolete. If your ship hulls are as weak as you suggest, then the situation in space is going to be even more extreme, with opponents able to blast ships out of space from ranges of 10's or 100's of 1000's of kilometers with explosives that clear whole cubic kilometers of space of your foes. The only situations that would lead to boarding actions in such situations amount to police actions - maybe you want to recover a ship from pirates without blowing it up, or rescue hostages.

And even in such cases, it's clear that swarms of drones wielding tasers and tear gas and any number of other advanced weapons I could probably brainstorm up for close quarters work, are much more effective than knives and spears. Right now we have armor that works fairly well at stopping bullets. If melee combat was still a thing, just think how well the modern equivalent of plate mail would work if we needed such a thing.

I'm sure that civilizations with enough technology to live and work in space would have things I can't imagine, but I'd much rather be using a 20mm semi-automatic grenade launcher filled with paper shelled flash/concussion grenades, guns shooting heat seeking bladed micro-missiles, tasers, gas launched micro-robots that cling to foes and scuttle about looking for hypodermic needle injection sites (imagine a weapon that covered you with the high tech equivalent of bullet ants), goop guns that fire sticky visor/eye/sensor covering slime, hacking probes that tried to insert malware and turn off ship's life support, low velocity dum-dum rounds that rip flesh and burst your cells like so many balloons but have very low penetration, little high velocity nano-bullets that embed themselves in skin and release cyanide, so forth if I had to take a space ship and disable its crew. Very likely, you could do all of that with the advanced equivalent of quadcopters and not risk your own crew.