Tired of hearing people hate on longer battle times in strategic RPG's

[pawsplay]

There's a fair number of ways of getting at "strategy" and "tactics" that don't automatically equal "more choices to make moving a miniature around and choosing their attack". There's a fair number of small press/indy rpgs out there that have tactics/strategy as a significant function of their design (Burning Wheel comes to mind) that doesn't result in hours taken for a combat.

Certainly. And even old-school map-based combat like GURPS can be speedy. GURPS combat tends to revolve on wagering the right balance of offense and defense, or exploiting possible weaknesses in your opponent. Hero System offers maneuver choices, and also offers a variety of interim "conditions" and good effects between "alive," "bloodied," and "dead," such as knockback/knockdown, out of Endurance, stunned, etc. that are not reliant on discrete powers for the most part.

 

[Scurvy_Platypus]

We just recently stopped our Pathfinder game to return to our roots and play 1e. I'm seeing just as much tactical combat as in Pathfinder - it just takes half as long. I fail to see where newer rulesets present more options. At character creation, certainly, but in combat it's the same as it's always been.

Ah. Here's where some of the disconnect may be occuring in the conversation...

The current edition of 3.x/4E rules explicitly encode more combat rules into the book. Previous editions, it was much more dependent on the group and/or the GM. As such, there was a degree of arbitrariness in some respects; plenty of folks had homebrewed systems of one sort or another to increase the degree of tactical options in the movement of their miniatures.

Now, here's where there's some interesting food for thought...

There's an element of system mastery that occurs in a game. 3.x for example was explicitly built to partially screw you if you didn't achieve it. The hardcoded combat rules of D&D are something that people have gotten used to as well and they've sort of incorporated at least some aspects of them.

While it's not really easy to get at, it'd be interesting to see to what extent long-term play or even starting under 3.x has as an influence on people, when they go "backwards" to either a previous D&D system, or perhaps something like C&C; something where all those explicitly hardcoded rules have been tossed out.

This whole thing also sort of bumps up against the RAW (Rules As Written) mantra/obsession that's so popular these days. How far a group is willing to drift the rules (either new or old) I suspect also influences how acceptable the tactical miniature focus or lack thereof is.

As with many things in life, there's actually a lot of little things that sort of add into the mixture and influence the push and pull of this kind of conversation. It puts me in mind of the whole additive/subtractive nature of color and how that influences a piece of art you're working on depending on the medium you're using.

 

[Dannager]

We just recently stopped our Pathfinder game to return to our roots and play 1e. I'm seeing just as much tactical combat as in Pathfinder - it just takes half as long. I fail to see where newer rulesets present more options. At character creation, certainly, but in combat it's the same as it's always been.

Oh? Let's test that. List all the choices a 1e character has to make during a typical turn. For simplicity's sake, let's use 1st level Fighters.

In 4e, the tactical choices a 1st level Fighter must make are as follows:

Moving on your turn?
Double moving on your turn?
Are you running?
Where are you moving to? (bearing in mind that every individual square bears tactical significance, something that is not true of most previous editions of the game)
Will your movement provoke opportunity attacks?
Are you shifting?
Is your movement occurring before or after your standard action, if you are taking one?
Will you be attacking?
If so, attacking whom? (bearing in mind that your average 4e encounter includes roughly 5 monsters, sometimes more, sometimes less, and you need to consider not only the damage you will be dealing, but additional effects and how your mark will affect things)
With which of your attack powers (of which you will typically have between 4 and 6 to choose between)?
If this is a Close or Area power, how will you place the area of effect?
Will your attack provoke an opportunity attack?
If there is an additional decision to be made as part of your attack power (forced movement, for example), how will you handle that? (again, bearing in mind that each individual square on the battlefield has tactical significance)
If you are not attacking, will you be using your Second Wind?
Will you be taking a minor action?
If so, at what point during your turn will you be using it?
What will your minor action be? A potion? A racial power? Some other action?

I'm sure I'm forgetting quite a few.

4e is a tactically deep game. It easily gives you double the number of meaningful decision points that early editions did, especially for classes that were typically more "mindless".

 

[Thunderfoot]

I wouldn't go too far in casting it as an old-timer versus young'un issue. There are a whole lot of us who were around at the beginning who play and prefer modern RPGs and appreciate the evolution of the form through the years.

And, for the record, I have always played with minis, from the very beginning, as have the groups I've played with. Lead minis were as much a part of my childhood as D&D itself, collecting, painting, displaying. The early editions used inches, not real world yards and feet, for range and scale. I play more often without minis now than I ever did as a kid.

True enough - I was speaking in generalizations and as the old saying goes all generalizations are false...including this one.

As for the minis, there were some groups that did use minis, however, it was not the norm. I realize that the original concept came from miniature battles, but it moved beyond to an almost free-form game and the pendulum has swung back the other direction.

Again - generalization.

 

[Dannager]

Slow combats are the price 4e has to pay for avoiding swinginess, avoiding showboat moments, and an encounter structure that favors drawn out resolutions (i.e. grindiness). Tactical choices are just not that "significant" compared to those factors.

The multi-round structure of 4e combat (typically 6 to 10 rounds) is tactical depth. For the same reason that a game like chess is resolved over the course of multiple turns, a game like D&D has its encounter structure resolved over multiple rounds. Telling me that Game System X has highly lethal combats resolved in only a handful of turns (much less rounds), tells me that it has little tactical depth.

 

[kaomera]

Oh? Let's test that. List all the choices a 1e character has to make during a typical turn. For simplicity's sake, let's use 1st level Fighters.

All of the choices, or all of the choices that are specifically codified by the rules to have a specific mechanical effect? The 1e list should be at least as long as the 4e list. (Actually, given a 1 minute combat round it could be ten times as long, but functionally it isn't; it might actually be shorter but I'd expect the fictional element of "what can I do in 60 seconds" to win out over action limits.*) I'd suggest that there are actually more meaningful choices that a 1e fighter can make, but 4e is better at mechanically defining what you can and cannot do and this can actually encourage the player to do stuff. That last bit really seemed very counter-intuitive to me for a long time, but now I'm more and more thinking that it's true the vast majority of the time.

(* And just to further digress the point, 1e has no concept of a "minor action", but does that mean that such an action is always a full-round action, or that it has no limit at all? IMO specifics of how 1e is / was played are much harder to nail down than 4e.)

 

[the Jester]

Responding to this with "I disagree, GURPS/WHFRPG/my homebrew system includes tons of strategy without increasing the time combat takes," makes me very skeptical, and leads me to ask, "How, exactly?"

A combination of smaller numbers overall (e.g. lower defenses, hit points, damage, etc) and an explicit 10-second time limit on decision making. Also, less options is not the same as less tactical, especially if one of your options is "Do something cool and creative".

 

[Thunderfoot]

<SNIP>Telling me that Game System X has highly lethal combats resolved in only a handful of turns (much less rounds), tells me that it has little tactical depth.

Tell that to a Soldier on a battlefield. (US Army 1989 - 1998) Tactical depth and tactical complexity are not necessarily independent of each other, although it usually feels that way. So I can see both sides of this debate.

 

[Dannager]

All of the choices, or all of the choices that are specifically codified by the rules to have a specific mechanical effect? The 1e list should be at least as long as the 4e list. (Actually, given a 1 minute combat round it could be ten times as long, but functionally it isn't; it might actually be shorter but I'd expect the fictional element of "what can I do in 60 seconds" to win out over action limits.*) I'd suggest that there are actually more meaningful choices that a 1e fighter can make, but 4e is better at mechanically defining what you can and cannot do and this can actually encourage the player to do stuff. That last bit really seemed very counter-intuitive to me for a long time, but now I'm more and more thinking that it's true the vast majority of the time.

(* And just to further digress the point, 1e has no concept of a "minor action", but does that mean that such an action is always a full-round action, or that it has no limit at all? IMO specifics of how 1e is / was played are much harder to nail down than 4e.)

There are just as many meaningful choices that there aren't mechanical definitions (i.e. rules) for in 4e as there are in 1e. The only decision points that differ are going to be those covered by the rules, so that's what we're discussing.

 

[giant.robot]

The multi-round structure of 4e combat (typically 6 to 10 rounds) is tactical depth. For the same reason that a game like chess is resolved over the course of multiple turns, a game like D&D has its encounter structure resolved over multiple rounds. Telling me that Game System X has highly lethal combats resolved in only a handful of turns (much less rounds), tells me that it has little tactical depth.

GURPS combat tends to be over quickly but has a great deal of tactical depth. It's often over quickly because attacks do a lot of damage relative to characters' total hit points. To make things even deadlier characters face penalties when they take significant amounts of damage. In GURPS HP is a less abstract value than it is in D&D. In D&D it's an approximation of a character's ability to roll with punches where in GURPS it's actually the amount of physical abuse a character can endure.

A character's success in combat is as much about their planned actions and reactions to their opponents. There are a handful of actual actions a character can take on their turn and the only take one per round, GURPS rounds are one second of game tme. The combinations of those actions are important though. A character can make an All Out Attack to get a bonus to the roll or damage but then can't make an active defense that round. They better hope they land the attack or they've just opened themselves up for a counterattack they can't avoid. Thanks to the lethality of attacks if they land their attack the fight is over and if the miss and the defender counterattacks the fight is still over.