I once attended a pick-up game of D&D at a local community centre. It was terrible: the GM was new and inexperienced, and fully 2 hours of a 4 hour session was spent on a fight with some introductory kobolds. It was like pulling teeth, that combat. Enemies were all hit-point sink, the only complexity was which kobold to attack, and because it was an introductory fight we'd been railroaded there and the only way forward was through.
A large part of that could be chalked up to GM and player inexperience, but the whole thing soured me on elaborate combats with complex stats. My take-away was combat is tense but should be brief, and short, and we should get it over with as soon as possible.
I can't be the only one who thinks this way. There's lists of OSR challenges or traps which provide all sorts of ingenious set-ups for players to deal with, but I rarely see similar lists of combat situations on OSR blogs. Combat is the lethal thing that parties might die to, it's a semi-fail state for when the plan doesn't work, or a glorious lop-sided affair where the PCs wipe out their foes with poison, ambush, and bomb.
What if combat wasn't that, but a continuation of OSR puzzle-solving?
A lot of fixes I've tried with combat are mechanical (lower HP pools, auto-damage, death and injury tables), but here's a procedural one. (I'm trying to run an initiative-less system, but conceivably this could work for trad initiative-resolution combats too)
PROCEDURE:
1. Every round, the GM establishes a new tactical situation
2. The party discusses their approach
3. The GM resolves the collective approach, calling for rolls as appropriate
This isn't an earth-shaking new mechanic. There's plenty of GMs who do something like this, maybe broken up into initiative order, but I want to try explicitly seeing each round as an OSR puzzle.
The GM draws inspiration from the list below, and mixes them up. If this was a PbtA game they'd be GM Moves, or whatever.
ELEMENTS OF A COMBAT PUZZLE:
1. Enemies just deal damage
Eg. The goblin warriors rush forward, hacking at your shields and trying to slash you.
NOTE: I'm using Into the Odd's automatic damage. Enemies in this situation just do damage at the round's end.
2. A wind-up threat -> Something that threatens greater consequences if not dealt with
Eg. The poison bombardier stands at the back, mixing up vials into a grenade bottle.
The wizard waves his hands, and arcane sigils float in the air.
3. Limit their freedom of action
Eg. The room is filled with waist-deep water.
Assassin vines grasp at your feet.
The floor is slippery and covered with grease.
4. Separate them
Eg. Doeg the fighter stands on top of the cross-piece. Far below, Lucius duels the pirate captain.
5. Factor in terrain
Eg. The air is filled with soporific fumes.
Thick choking smog fills the room.
The volcano around you rumbles, spewing lava.
6. Threaten something they care about
Eg. One of the goblins peels off and runs towards your cowering hireling.
An orc carrying a torch runs off towards the wall. He's going to blow the bomb!
7. Offer a prize out of reach, with or without time pressure -> Read broadly, this can be a valuable treasure or some sort of opportunity.
Eg. Behind the spearwall, the priest is legging it with the jewels!
As you fend off the blows of the shadow creature, you think you hear someone muttering and chanting behind the wall. Is it the caster?
There's probably others I haven't thought of, and anyway, they overlap. Reading broadly, a GM might cobble together a simple scene. Here's one from Sacré Bleu, which my players are currently running through.
It combines elements of dealing damage, having a wind-up threat, using terrain and limiting their movement.
The goblin riflemen rain fire down on you from the safe position on the hill-top. Behind them, a trio of goblins are manhandling a cumbersome weapon into place. The rock you're crouched behind gives some cover, but stepping out from behind it means braving a fusillade of shots.
There's all kinds of things going on behind the scenes here. By default, the goblins are dealing reduced damage, but are hard to reach. Stepping out from the rocks would probably require some kind of Dex Test to not take additional damage. If the PCs don't get past the line of riflemen to take out the goblin weapon-crew, the machine gun opens fire and blows through their cover.
The advantage of this is that the GM is free to slow down combat and make it an interesting puzzle that PCs can discuss, or just speed it up and say Ok there's four ant-men and they all run at you angrily trying to bite you.
Every round, the GM creates a new tactical scene based on the resolution of the last.
Sorry for the necromancy (my specialty btw), how is your experience with this style of combat? Anything that is weird, dont work as well as intended, etc? I see a lot of people talking about this style, but very few actual playtest experience with pros, cons and weird about it.
ReplyDeleteWhat does it does well? What does it does wrong?
OSR classical style say that the GM is a referee narrating a unforgiving world with clear procedures. You have to know and survive the procedures, you live in a "real" world with it´s own laws. These procedures try to minimize the arbitrarily of the GM role, so he can be judgement free of character death.
Personally, i like this no-initiative style, but i'm having a hard time consolidating it with the "imparcial referee" role of the GM.
Hello Edvando!
ReplyDeletePROs:
- No initiative worked fine with my group, and we often ended up doing round-robin anyway. (Here's what the goblins are going to do. Brandt, what do you do? Ok, roll for it. Shoo, what do you do? Ok, that works.)
- Really, really sped up combat (especially with a low-hitpoints system).
CONs:
- Thinking of twists and challenges on the spot, round after round, is pretty tiring. Often I would just revert to dealing damage.
- It really depends on having a good, clear, set-up. Having a fight take place in a brewery and carefully telegraphing that there are all these barrels around works a lot better than improvising a fight in a generic empty room where nothing has been established to exist.
- It depends on the right sort of players, who aren't trying to argue endlessly with the GM (but then, so does regular play).
The main trick for me is to make sure the GM works hard to understand what PCs are trying to DO, and communicates any details the players (not the PCs!) might not understand. I'm a big believer in this: https://www.bastionland.com/2018/09/the-ici-doctrine-information-choice.html
For instance:
Player - 'I grab hold of a vine and jump off the railing!'
GM - 'Hang on, what are you trying to do?'
Player - 'I want to swing on the vine past the heads of the orcs.'
GM - 'That sounds like a good idea, but the vine is pretty thin. I'll roll a fortune die to see if it holds, you sure you want to jump?'
In this situation, if the GM HADN'T told the player what seemed obvious to the PC (this vine is not sturdy!!) then punished the player with a fortune roll or had the vine break, a player might reasonably be upset.
I sometimes find the OSR emphasis on procedures as a shield against GM fiat as a little misleading, because a lot of out-of-combat adventuring basically boils down to 'rulings not rules'. For me, the trick is that the GM has to mentally see themselves as a referee when they make calls, not as an opponent (adversarial GM-ing) or a fan of the characters (PbtA GM-ing, which to be clear, is perfectly fine and valid).
My plan is to play a OSR campaign using classic modules like B2 and such. A lot of the combat and locations are fairly simple dungeon locations, with a lot of "monster attack" type of fight. Weird Pirate setting helps a lot with the creative scenery and enemy doing creative stuff.
DeleteI'm also thinking of using the Into The Odd combat system, seems to speed combat a lot. Any thoughts, good, bad and ugly about it?
My plan is to try to inject a little creativity in the classic monsters, like Ogre try to pick up a player and throw into teammates, Kobolds using bolas, glue sacks, rotten poisonous eggs and traps to fight, Orcs using hunter-like fighting style with nets, spears, lasso, to slave people, etc.