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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5491910" data-attributes="member: 58197">I don't think we need to give up so easily. That sort of "description combat," as you put it, is not necessarily ruined by giving players more tactical options or better balanced math. The way I see it, most of the problem comes from the combination of strong battlemat focus and abstract combat mechanics, where the underlying concept (what the combatant is actually doing in the game world) is an afterthought. Fixing those would go a long way to resurrecting that style of play.It might also help to have complex tactical options--the stuff that players frown and puzzle over--be designed to come late in the fight. One way to do this (not necessarily the best, just throwing out an idea) would be with a "token pool" mechanic such as Iron Heroes used; you accumulate tokens from round to round and then spend them to power special abilities. That way, in a short skirmish, by the time you had to select an Awesome Combat Move, the fight would be mostly over and you wouldn't have to sweat the decision. Just pick whichever move is the most Awesome and watch the last bad guy explode in extra-gruesome fashion. <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=":)" /> Big fights would last longer, so you'd have time to really explore the range of options available, but you still wouldn't be making a big decision every round.This would also address the problem some designer noted a few months ago in the executioner design article, where the last rounds of combat suck because everybody's down to their at-wills; right at the moment when you want to be speeding things up and bringing the fight to a conclusion, things are slowing down instead.I don't have time to play different games for each, and I don't accept that one game can't do both... in the same combat, no less. People around here are way too quick to say "It can't be done." <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=":)" /></blockquote>

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