Vampire's new "three-round combat" rule

[The Crimson Binome]

That's true in a duel, when there's no one and nothing else involved. If those two experts are blocking each other's blows, clang clang clang, in a burning building, then perhaps the roll which ends the fight is the DM roll on round 5 determining that the second story collapses into flaming rubble. Or perhaps Horatio held off the Etruscan vanguard, long enough for other Romans to ignite the bridge, denying the Etruscan army entry into Rome; the collapse of the bridge into flaming rubble ends Horatio's life and also meets his victory condition.

Which is another reason why I don't consider high parry values to be a flaw of the system (in either GURPS or BESM). The long duels where two master keep each other engaged, while they ignore important things going on around them, are some of the best and most engaging parts of a story. A good rule set should be designed in such a way as to facilitate those encounters (without relying on narrative coercion to make them happen unnaturally).

 

[uzirath]

Which is another reason why I don't consider high parry values to be a flaw of the system (in either GURPS or BESM). The long duels where two master keep each other engaged, while they ignore important things going on around them, are some of the best and most engaging parts of a story.

I agree with these sentiments unequivocally. I've had PCs locked in duels with antagonists in GURPS solely to buy time for another character (e.g., a cleric performing an exorcism). Against a superior foe, they have tactical choices like All Out Defense and Retreat that increase their odds of surviving even if they won't prevail in the conflict. These scenes can be magnificent.

A good rule set should be designed in such a way as to facilitate those encounters (without relying on narrative coercion to make them happen unnaturally).

Here I break with you slightly on your parenthetical note. I agree that the rules should facilitate this*, but I don't necessarily see narration as coercive if everybody is up for it. It's merely a different way of playing out a story. The mechanics themselves, even in a well-designed system, are a coercive element because they define the menu of possibilities.

Example: I love GURPS for the intricacy of its combat mechanics. The second-by-second element works great for most encounters. Combat is usually fast and furious. Sometimes, however, we want to feature a duel that takes minutes rather than seconds. Nobody at the table wants to play out 120+ turns of combat. So we might break that duel into snapshots with 3-5 seconds on the main floor, 3-5 seconds on the staircase, 3-5 seconds on the bridge, etc. Maybe we assess some fatigue in between (especially if we're using extra effort rules). Designed right, each snapshot has a real impact. If the PC duelist dies, obviously, it's bad. But even if she merely makes poor tactical choices, the enemy could drive closer to his goal or set off the alarm or end up in an increasingly beneficial tactical situation (higher on the stairs, driving the PC toward the crumbling edge of the bridge, etc.). Within each snapshot, of course, we would be using the full range of mechanics on a second-by-second scale. Done well, this can be amazingly satisfying to all participants and can make an encounter stand out without merely adding more abilities to the opponent or otherwise amping up the usual elements.

* Presuming this is what the group likes. Another set of rules might not facilitate this, but they should not pretend to be awesome rules for simulating protracted duels.

 

[aramis erak]

[MENTION=88987]Jonathon[/MENTION] Tweet:
No experience with it in VTM (haven't run it since the 90's).
I've seen reductions in other games, tho'.

Burning Wheel has a pretty nifty one-roll resolution option. If it's not worth a full combat, narrate the general approaches, and use the help mechanics, one roll, and narrate the result. Had a campaign twist "badly" due to one such. (Was a great story twist. Bad, bad, badda boombad bad for the PCs.)

While not quite the same as the three round combat, in Sentinels Comics RPG (which is based on Fate Accelerated, I think), combat is timed. There are only so many rounds until the combat is over, regardless of who has the upper hand. What happens when the last round is over depends on how close to winning the heroes were.

In the starter kit, failure to stop the big-bad often results in "losing" the scenario. When it doesn't, it means the next scene starts hopped up.

It's a good and interesting mechanic, but it doesn't feel like it would be right for many genres. Military sci-fi? Cops? Supers? Yes!

John Wick's approach in a few games has been "initiative is how many turns you'll get in this whole scene." It works, but can become very stilted.

 

[ParanoydStyle]

Player curation has given me excellent results. When I run a convention game, "Please be ready with your action" is an early recourse, and "Apparently you spent those six seconds pondering your options. Next player, what's your action?" is not far behind.

That's not player curation, player curation (or at least what I meant by it) was choosing carefully who you game with. You're talking about player conditioning which I approve of and wish I could do myself, but I'm afraid to. Generally my players have NOT reacted well. Several hissy fits have happened over people losing their turns to indecision, even when I only gamed with a group of close, close friends. Considering the embarrassingly bad-behavior I've seen from squawling angry manchildren at conventions over far more minor GM "transgressions" than skipping their turn, I'd be terrified to try this at a convention. I mean, I'm sure that 4/5 players would be fine with it but that 20% that would freak out at me is not worth the risk.

ADMITTEDLY, I should say my technique was not particularly gentle. After the first three warnings, I (as I warned I would) instituted a shot clock rule like in the NBA and started counting down loudly from ten after someone who'd been warned had squandered 15 or 30 seconds of time on their turn. I think an egg-timer (is that what you call those little hourglasses?) might serve me better.

My ex, who was my most consistent player for the 11 years we were together, would generally freeze up when put under this kind of pressure, and become non-functional: she was not good with timed things and apparently had had problems with timed math tests in grade school, and as she had this phobia about doing math under time pressure (and D&D does involve math), she would actually have a panic attack. So I mean, if I was smarter, I would have realized earlier on that giving her the countdown was counterproductive. Oh well. Probably not even in the top fifty things I bollixed up in that relationship.

Chess can move quickly or slowly. In one variant, each player gets a time cap, not per move, but for the whole game; you move, you hit the button, that stops your timer and starts the opponent's timer. If you checkmate the opponent OR if your opponent's timer runs out, you win.

I'm familiar with speed chess, actually. When I was very little (10-12) I was trained to play it competitively--not specifically speed chess but it was an important part of it. (While I wasn't very good and being even more insecure then than I am now, I thought I was terrible and thus gave up on it before I turned 16 ... every time a casual game of chess has come up since then I have utterly dominated my opponents. In spite of the fact that I have forgotten every single opening and all the other things I was forced to memorize ten times over. Still, in my 20s, I guess the instincts that Nathan drilled into me were good enough that even though I was trash as a competitive player as a kid, I can still crush filthy chess casuals as an adult. While drunk and stoned. END DIGRESSION.)

 

[Riley37]

The long duels where two master keep each other engaged, while they ignore important things going on around them, are some of the best and most engaging parts of a story. A good rule set should be designed in such a way as to facilitate those encounters (without relying on narrative coercion to make them happen unnaturally).

I dream of a rules set which supports those scenes, and also the Nine Walkers fighting their way through Moria, and also Usual Suspects.

Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone, playing Inigo Montoya versus Wesley... no, wait, in Captain Blood:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uog-mJYyloQ

 

[Riley37]

I had completely forgotten about Pandemic and it is a good call out. I'm not sure it overturns my claim by counter example (you seem to think it doesn't) but it does come at least close enough that I'm going to spend some time thinking about applying the lessons of Pandemic to RPG minigames.

You hold yourself (sometimes stubbornly) to a standard of rigor, in the search for precise understandings of the relationships between preparation and play, between process and narrative, and so forth, which exceeds anything I could impose on you; so IMO it matters less whether *I think* my examples of Pandemic and basketball actually overturn your claim, and more whether you find yourself usefully nudged towards your goals. I figured that when you said "game", you meant the scope of TRPGs, not including boardgames such as Pandemic nor games of basketball, and not the wider scope which includes Kipling's "Great Game" and Roosh V's "game".

That said, I've or twice been briefly close to armed close-quarters combat with a slight prospect of ending in death or major injury (fortunately averted), and the memories remain vivid. IMO it's fundamentally different from basketball in that I don't get the shakes after playing basketball. I dunno how much other TRPGers *want* fight scenes to even suggest any feeling close to what I felt... I mean, we don't see Aragorn getting the shakes after he fights off Nazgul with a sword and a torch, we don't see Luke Skywalker getting the shakes after he almost fails and dies in the attack on the Death Star, maybe we don't want our PCs to feel that way either. I'm inclined to maintain, either way, that combat has unique aspects, which influence its role in TRPG.

As for a theoretical example of a game which centers on basketball, and how it would compare to TRPGs which center on fight scenes, perhaps video games and computer games have useful points of comparison. I've rarely enjoyed sports-simulation computer games; the only one I remember strongly from my quarters-in-the-video-arcade days is CyberBall, which was more violent than most sports simulations, though it lacked buttons labelled "punch" or "kick", in contrast to Fighters of Fighting and so forth.

I am thinking, however, of the parallels between a fast short fight scene, a one-round boxing match, and a swiftly decisive point in Ultimate Frisbee; versus a protracted TRPG fight scene, a ten-round boxing match, and a point of Ultimate in which possession changes several times before one team finally scores, by some combination of a defensive error leaving an exploitable gap, with offense rising to the opportunity. Hm, those tended to happen on windy days, which kinda relates to your point about circumstances, environmental factors, fighting on terrain other than an endless flat plain. Fatigue played an increasing role (since that game allows reinforcements only between points).

I once tried to use the "fight defensively and let the opponent tire himself out, THEN go all-out and win" tactic in a TRPG duel. We were using Hero System, which has an endurance stat, but the GM wasn't using those rules for the NPC foe, so the fight was both tediously slow and narratively a failure on the axis I intended. The fight scene was also intended to advance the narrative by someone else, in the stands of the arena, watching the fight, to notice a plot-relevant detail, and it succeeded on that axis, so not a total loss. I'd still like to someday play a scene, in which that's an appropriate tactic for the hero AND the system supports it mechanically.

 

[Riley37]

I agree this is the crux of the problem with a three round hard limit. As with my hypothetical Hoosiers: The RPG, it's not the last rounds of combat you would want to narrate away, and if you had to choose which rounds to handwave away with narration you'd choose the ones leading up to the resolution and not the all important resolution itself.

A parallel with a movie, so take with the usual caveats about movies versus TRPG, but we're squarely in agreement AFAIK:

"The Karate Kid" does not end with the final round of combat in which the protagonist knocks out the antagonist with the go-for-broke crane kick. If the DM wrapped up the fight scene after three rounds of GURPS-style "you hit! he blocks! he hits! you block!" with "Much later, you win, so describe your winning move - how do you want to do this?"...
...and then started the next session with "so, after a week of downtime..."

...then the story would not include the awards ceremony, the antagonist mustering the grace to congratulate the hero, the romantic interest getting to end up with the nice guy AND the winner since they're now the same person, and the following scene in the parking lot in which the contest between Cobra Kai and Miyagi's teachings is no longer by proxy.

 

[aramis erak]

It doesn't really have to. High level GURPS in older editions had a problem where if two experts fought each other, the only blows that would land would be critical hits that bypassed active defenses, and these were only scored on relatively rare rolls. The result would be that you might have round after round where each fighter attempted to land a blow but was reliably parried or dodged. Not only did the round not change anything, but it didn't advance either side toward victory and the winner was determined by one lucky blow.

To fix that math there was a common house rule - later adopted into the core rules - where expert fighters could 'power attack' and exchange chance to hit for reduction in the opponent's active defenses.

Attacking a highly skilled fighter in GURPS is a stupid move if you're alone... even if you're a highly skilled fighter.

His 1 parry per round is likely to hurt, bad.
Using 3E numbers (because they're the same as 1st and 2nd, and I have it to hand)...
A really skilled front-line fighter is likely to start at 18 weapon and 16 shield, have 3-6 PD, and a parry of 9... so when he parries, his parry succeeds on a 12- to 16- (PD+Parry), and the riposte on 16- with NO defense.

Add 50 points of experience, (another point of DX and another weapon skill), and that's 13- to 16- and the riposte on 16-...

Melee in early GURPS is actually not all that long if the target's competent, as the only recourse on a riposte is the DR value reducing the damage. And it's ALWAYS the weapon limb.

The point where it slows is the two deciding to do all out defenses until the other flinches (because the first to attack is likely to be the first hit)....

Many people didn't actually READ the Parry rule, tho', and so a lot of ripostes never got rolled for.

 

[Celebrim]

You hold yourself (sometimes stubbornly) to a standard of rigor, in the search for precise understandings of the relationships between preparation and play, between process and narrative, and so forth, which exceeds anything I could impose on you; so IMO it matters less whether *I think* my examples of Pandemic and basketball actually overturn your claim, and more whether you find yourself usefully nudged towards your goals.

Oh, I do. I certainly find your comments vastly more useful than the majority of comments I get when someone disagrees with my ideas. If I could award you 10 XP to the comment rather than 1, I would.

You are correctly assuming that I wanted a rigorous answer, but you are going in the wrong direction regarding the sort of rigor I was claiming. I wasn't merely stating that because combat had unique qualities related to a cooperative activity that existing RPGs uniquely treated the concept of combat, but that all possible RPGs uniquely treated the concept of combat (or else presumably would fail in their narrative goals). I did realize that since I had not actually enumerated every possible cooperative activity in my head, but rather only the sort of activities that RPGs normally treat, that activities might exist which RPGs do not normally treat that might have parallel structure to combat, but at the time I couldn't think what they might be. So, I put a caveat in my otherwise universal claim that, should such non-combat cooperative activities exist, in order to support them a hypothetical RPG would need to develop rules for that activity which supported the simulation and resolution of that activity which were as complex as those developed to support combat.

Your insights where therefore very useful, as I can now examine whether my assumptions regarding those hypothetical RPGs were correct. In essence, you are allowing me to imagine RPGs that don't yet exist because no one (so far as I know) has ever thought to create them - RPGs revolving around sports as conflict or being members of a disease control emergency response team.

We don't see Aragorn getting the shakes after he fights Nazgul, but Frodo is pretty explicitly suffering from what we'd now call 'Post Traumatic Stress Disorder' as he gets the crap kicked out of him far harder than anyone else in the story. Likewise, Faramir and Eowyn are explicitly given a time of grief, depression and slow healing after their traumatic experiences. Tolkien went through WWI - he has a good idea what 'shell shock' is like, and a great deal of empathy for it.

Likewise, while we could imagine an RPG that revolves around a games 'Capture the Flag' or a game of Basketball, I agree with you that there are reasons why such an RPG is unlikely to ever be mainstream. Sports may be the nearest thing to war, but they aren't war.

The remainder of your post I'm going to have to save to a latter point, since I only had 5 minutes to spare to respond. However, I agree with you in the value of lengthy conflicts. The question becomes, how do we achieve that?

 

[GMMichael]

Haven't played Vampire in, um, decades, but it looks like the dead horse has been thoroughly beaten by now. . .

Providing a three-round rule as an option seems sort of pointless; doesn't the storyteller have the discretion to end a scene at any time? I guess the tenets of Naming Magic provide that creating a rule for it makes it more likely to happen.

Burning Wheel has a pretty nifty one-roll resolution option. If it's not worth a full combat, narrate the general approaches, and use the help mechanics, one roll, and narrate the result. Had a campaign twist "badly" due to one such. (Was a great story twist. Bad, bad, badda boombad bad for the PCs.)

Yikes. One-roll conflicts are a great idea, but probably not if it could go bada-boom bad for the PCs.

I dream of a rules set which supports those scenes, and also the Nine Walkers fighting their way through Moria, and also Usual Suspects.

Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone, playing Inigo Montoya versus Wesley...

Modos RPG provides rules for conflicts based on progress toward goals, instead of character death. While Inigo and Westley would roll against each other's physical scores (hit points), the Fellowship would roll against the progress goal of escape, but so would the goblins/orcs to stop them!