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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5744030" data-attributes="member: 42582">That there is story involved in the fight - that is, that something is at stake which matters to the players and is relevant to their engagement with the fiction via their PCs - I am taking for granted.But I think mechanics can still matter to this. If the stakes are very high, but the mechanics (as can be the case with Runequest or Traveller, for example) take the form of "miss", "miss", "miss", "hit and win!", then the actual process of resolving the combat won't itself be a microcosm of story and drama. It will just ratchet up the tension until the outcome is decided.I also find traditional D&D mechanics make for boring combat. My flight from AD&D to Rolemaster was driven both by the standard realism concerns about hit points, and also by the fairly common feeling that victory by attrition made for boring combat. That the combat itself is high stakes doesn't reduce the tedium of the attrition as a resolution process.I'm not talking about styles so much as mechanics. "First lucky strike" isn't a style of gameplay, it's a property of the action resolution mechanics of games like RM, RQ and Traveller. And also high-level 3E, but substituting "first failed save" for "first lucky strike". (I suspect maybe also Burning Wheel, but (i) I don't have the play experience with BW to form a strong view, and (ii) BW has other mechanics, including both "shrug it off" mechanics and also its expectations about what losing a combat means, to make it a bit different from the traditional games.)Scry-buff-teleport is also, in my view, a mechanical phenomenon. (Which "first lucky strike" encourages.) It doesn't even depend on having access to scrying, to teleportation, or to buffing! What it depends upon is mechanics which make it possible (i) for the PCs (and hence the players) to gain advance knowledge of when a fight will take place, and (ii) for the PCs to benefit, in the ensuing combat, from deploying their resources in advance and/or in an opening surprise salvo.Even at low-levels in classic D&D this can be done to an extent using invisible and silent scouting, and then casting Sleep and/or Hold Person and/or backstabbing.4e has the first sort of mechanics - the scrying/scouting options - but not the second. The PCs can't win a fight by expending their resources in advance or in a surprise round. The important decisions about resource expenditure have to be made in the course of the combat itself.Different mechanical resolution systems can make it more or less likely that the sort of scenario you talk about will come about.A "first lucky strike" system, for example, discourages the GM from having the BBEG ambush the PCs, because such a system makes it more likely that the ambush will see a significant number of PCs killed.An attrition system, like classic D&D, makes the sort of scenario you describe less dramatic (in my view) because once combat has begun it offers few options for turning the tide or "making your own luck" other than lucky rolls to hit or to damage.4e has mechanical features - its emphasis on movement and position as an integral component of combat resolution, for example, and its very liberal use of conditions that make the resolution of combat more than just a matter of attrition - that make it different from many other mainstream fantasy RPGs. There are many, many ways in which the players, by clever play, can make their own luck. And the correlation between mechanics and fiction means that this will be different from making your own luck if you're a clever chess player or poker player or whatever - because the players' clever use of the game rules translates (at least typically) into interesting events in the fiction.4e also has mechancial features - like the need for PCs, if they are to win combats, to gain access to their healing surges - which make it more likely that the sort of "down to a single healing surge each" moments you describe will take place. These same mechanics also make it very common for the tide of battle to swing, quite dramatically, one way or another. In some ways it resembles the action resolution system in HeroWars (of points bidding, and the shifting of points one way or another) but obviously much less abstract.This sort of thing can, of course, happen in other games. But at least in my experience, in a game like AD&D or RM it will be a result of changes in luck with the dice (every Rolemaster group has their story about the time a player rolled double-open-ended-high to pluck victory from the jaws of defeat). In 4e it is also, to a significant extent, a result of the players' clever use of their PCs' powers and action budget.Which is where roles come in. Because it is the existence of focused PC builds that helps create the mechanical intricacy of the interaction between powers and the action economy.At the moment my game is in mid-Paragon. In story terms, I would think of it as comparable to name level AD&D.I've heard differing view expressed about whether 4e combat breaks down at Epic (and/or later Paragon). I'm curious to find out - and obviously am hoping that it doesn't!</blockquote>

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