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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5635562" data-attributes="member: 2067">Yeah, that's true. I still can't grok why a CoC game would have intricately detailed combat rules. A fast, simple, smooth kind of resolution system, with high risk, serves nicely.Having detailed combat rules in CoC is like having intricate cake-baking rules in D&D. It doesn't serve much of a purpose. That's not to say firefights and shoot-outs don't happen, just that you don't need more than a few paragraphs of rules for when they do (and those rules could easily be part of some other general task resolution subsystem).On the other hand, IMO, you'd dang well better have pretty detailed investigation rules in CoC. Uncovering hidden knowledge, and resisting its effects long enough to do some temporary good, seem very core to the game, and spending your precious little play time on this sort of discovery is key. Loosing sanity is in many ways the XP of CoC. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Its unnecessary in an RPG, too. If there's risk, you can use whatever resolution system accurately reflects the genre (above, I recommended something fast and risky...this could be as simple as "Flip a coin. Heads, you kill a cultist. Tails, you are shot and will die without medical attention....though I probably wouldn't recommend something quite so fast-and-loose in actuality, I also wouldn't recommend HP and AC and damage dice and facing and action economy rules). If there's no risk, you don't need to roll anything. There's gotta be some way to resolve conflict in most any RPG, but it doesn't need to be the intricate rules-crunch turn-based two-dice-per-turn action-spending detail of D&D combat, nor does it need to be an important pillar of the game. In fact, the resolution of combat can be simply, "You get into combat, you die." That's not always (or even usually) the best rule. But it is a very simple rule, and it serves its purpose of resolving combat quickly and easily. (BSG space combat, specifically, I'd imagine as being very wargame-esque: you are less concerned with individual units, which die rather often, and are more concerned with the overall success of the battle, and perhaps the fate of your main characters. There's a lot of strategy involved, and only a bit of luck. Person-scale combat I'd imagine would be a lot more quick-n-deadly -- not a lot of use for HP's in a genre where bullets do kill and where no one is much of a hero).Y'ever play Amber Diceless? What about Dogs In The Vineyard? Point being: combat doesn't need any more rules than a general "roll a die, see what happens" if combat is not the game's focus. There doesn't need to even be a "combat system." When combat is not important, you can de-emphasize it to the point where it's a one-sentence description of how quickly you die is all you need. So when you have intricate combat rules, it is a choice to have them.It's not necessary to have detailed combat rules. It's a choice you make when designing a game. The effect of the rules being to guide play, when you have detailed combat rules, the game certainly values combat and expects you to do a lot of it. The things you have details for are what the game expects you to do a lot of.D&D, FWIW, has usually had nods towards things that are not combat. Even back in the day, only one class (the Fighting Man) was about combat. Magic-Users and Clerics (and later Thieves) were more about exploration and error-recovery (implying that you probably will make mistakes and need someone to remedy them), given their spells. Levels gave you followers, strongholds, and subjects, and though the rules weren't intricately detailed, they were certainly there. The combat rules that existed were pretty arcane, but not nearly as complex as 3e and 4e's combat systems. 4e has skill challenges and rituals, though there are problems with each. Personally, I'd like to see D&D have some solid, robust, interesting rules for conflicts with NPCs and the environment, too.</blockquote>

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