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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gorgon Zee" data-source="post: 7600788" data-attributes="member: 75787">Definitely, yes. I should have cited your response as it crystallized my thinking. For me, any discussion of mechanics or approaches has one central goal: making things as enjoyable as possible for the participants. It’s maybe obvious and banal, but it’s explicitly what I look for and supersedes other goals. So your statement that so long as the fiction is evolving each round and remain interesting, combat should keep going, is absolutely what I feel is the goal of combat. Honestly, it’s the same in investigation — so longs as finding puzzles or clues is interesting and the fiction evolves, it’s good. My thoughts on the three-round limit are more on mechanical ways to support the goal. A good GM will call a fight when it gets boring regardless of system. What I find interesting is he concept of building rules that directly support the concept of ending combat before it gets boring — mechanical support for your goal. 13th Age uses the escalation dice to end fights faster, which I honestly love. The idea of setting a three round combat limit as another way of doing that made me think a bit about if that would work; what I would lose and what it gains. And overall I feel that it is worth trying out as an idea.For whatever reason three is a good number of times to do something before it gets tedious. I know that when I have played or run a set of sessions where there are N mcguffins to get, if N>3 it is less effective. The latter sessions have less excitement and I have to battle that. I just saw Infinity War yesterday, and (risking this will de-rail the thread) a few less stones to collect would have tightened the plot and made it feel less like a travelogue. As a thought experiment, I have played a lot of living D&D campaigns with a ton of GMs of all types of quality. I thought to myself, if they had all been told that they had to call combat after three rounds, and given some criteria for how to resolve the situation — would it have, on average, made those games more fun?I really think it would have. I think the weaker GMs would have been spared having to keep grinding away at joyless combats, and the stronger GMs would occasionally have said “I think we can continue this a few more rounds — that OK with you?”, and the games would have been more fun for all!Which, to me, is the goal.</blockquote>

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