What Makes A Great Combat System In Your Opinion?

Reynard · Jun 28, 2026

500 Toads said:
Taking too much time (in-universe, not at the table!), leaving too much evidence to readily dispose of, triggering alerts, and expending too many resources all come to mind. Characters don't have to keel over grievously injured for things to go seriously wrong.

D&D 5E theoretically is supposed to be balanced around a resource attrition model, although I doubt that a lot of tables strongly adhere to the "adventuring day" or are very strict with rests to make that work. I've been in a group where we treated an attack on a giants' stronghold as a single continuous, high-speed raid -- never pausing for more than a minute to evaluate things, let alone taking a short rest. We did this because the giants were organized opposition in their own stronghold, we were there to stop a particular event, and we weren't willing to have our characters act genre-aware (i.e. assuming that the plot schedule would conveniently alter itself for maximum drama, so that we could take as much in-universe time as we felt we needed and still magically reach the climax in the nick of time); but this is probably unusual, and most parties probably 'go nova' more than the system design nominally intends.

For something like the Shadowrun setting -- well, you may easily overpower the odd corporate security guard, but you can assume that they're networked with the rest of corporate security, and you don't want to still be there when e.g. a corporate high-threat response team shows up; so discretion and speed come into play. And, depending on what you're doing... well, "regular" data theft jobs on corporate targets and the like might not draw much in the way of retribution if you do manage a cleap escape (it's just a cost of doing business, their main grievance would have be with whomever hired you, and if you did things very competently and professionally they're probably more interested in hiring you for similar jobs rather than taking revenge); but if the results of your job humiliate a high-up in a powerful crime syndicate and you leave a sizeable evidence trail, well, you might have a problem down the road.

This feels well beyond the scope of the combat system. it seems you are talking about playstyle and setting rules.

500 Toads · Jun 28, 2026

Reynard said:
This feels well beyond the scope of the combat system. it seems you are talking about playstyle and setting rules.

Mostly just pointing out that depending on the situation, even a "victory" like "all the enemies are down, we're all still up" isn't necessarily an unmitigated win in the overall picture; and that playing out a combat to see how it happens may be important.

gtwucla · Jun 28, 2026

Something fast paced with high stakes. I want high risk, high reward decisions where failure has serious consequences. Basically, the last time I played 5e, the session ended with a 3 hour fight of heal, hit, heal, hit, heal, hit in a room with a bunch of enemies. I want the opposite of that. I vividly remember standing up and one point going, sorry guys, I got to go and someone looking at me and saying, "Don't you want to see the end?" I said, "Yes, I would love for it to end, is that happening soon?" I hung up my D&D spurs that day.

Thomas Shey · Jun 28, 2026

Reynard said:
Hero had a good maneuver/stance system built in. It was robust and provided meaningful choices, even if your PC was not a dedicated martial artist.

Hero combat was crunchy and had a lot to track but I never felt like it was too much effort for too little benefit as you sometimes do with complex combat subsystems.

Honestly, I found it the best system to play a martial artist in (in the fairly broad way Hero used that term) I've ever seen. But even less specialized characters always had a lot of choices they could make, and you could fairly easily figure out what was going on without having to layer a lot of mechanics-irrelevant color over the top of it.

The only problem that came up with Hero, and wasn't always easy to fix, was its origin as a superhero system meant it was fairly baked in that it was easier to knock people out than kill them, which in reality and even quasi-serious fiction leans the other way around. This could create some problems in a lot of genres and settings. But that was a specific issue about how damage was handled, not a problem with the combat system as a whole.