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alexandraerinI mentioned a bit ago that I lost my draft of the combat rules for A Wilder World. I've been working on recreating them, but a chance remark by Jack a couple of days ago about what he doesn't like about D&D has led me to question some of my core assumptions about a fantasy roleplaying game's combat system, which in turn has led me to revise my approach to the combat rules somewhat.
I say "somewhat" because it's only a slight change in direction... more a course correction of a few degrees than a u-turn... but a pretty serious change in gameplay. It's a matter of simplifying what's already there, possibly to the point of removing some of the character stats that will now be superfluous.
Before the shift, every round of combat began with a contest between the players and the opposing side to seize the tactical "advantage" for the round. Then both sides would declare their actions for the round, but the side with Advantage would get to hear what the other side was doing and take it into account before they decided what to do.
Here's how it works now: there is no "tactical contest" at the start of the round. The GM tells the players what their enemies are going to do, and the players respond. In other words, it plays out the same as if the players made their tactical rolls every single turn.
Within the round things play out more or less the same as they would have. The rules for attacking and defending aren't really changing, except for some small adjustments to how defenses are declared/work to adjust for the fact that PCs will almost* always know what attacks are coming their way when they declare their actions and the GM won't know what the PCs are doing when deciding what the NPCs do.
(*I say "almost always" because there will be room for mid-round surprises.)
The other difference is that there will be more possibility of interfering with an action in progress... under the old rules, everything was assumed to happen more or less at once and any effects (like being defeated, or knocked off one's feet) didn't apply until the start of the next round. That was mainly intended to stop a bunch of cascading contingencies from making combat ever more complicated.
Why the change?
Well, as a minor note, grabbing advantage is such a huge... advantage... that optimizing characters/parties to do it as often as possible would probably be a pretty normal part of gameplay anyway. It would be a required first step for powergaming, and any group that didn't have at least one person who was optimized for tactics would be at a serious disadvantage. I'm not saying that game design decisions should be made to either placate or thwart munchkins, but it's not a bad thing to remove something from the game that feels like a requirement.
There are bigger reasons for the change, though:
I say "somewhat" because it's only a slight change in direction... more a course correction of a few degrees than a u-turn... but a pretty serious change in gameplay. It's a matter of simplifying what's already there, possibly to the point of removing some of the character stats that will now be superfluous.
Before the shift, every round of combat began with a contest between the players and the opposing side to seize the tactical "advantage" for the round. Then both sides would declare their actions for the round, but the side with Advantage would get to hear what the other side was doing and take it into account before they decided what to do.
Here's how it works now: there is no "tactical contest" at the start of the round. The GM tells the players what their enemies are going to do, and the players respond. In other words, it plays out the same as if the players made their tactical rolls every single turn.
Within the round things play out more or less the same as they would have. The rules for attacking and defending aren't really changing, except for some small adjustments to how defenses are declared/work to adjust for the fact that PCs will almost* always know what attacks are coming their way when they declare their actions and the GM won't know what the PCs are doing when deciding what the NPCs do.
(*I say "almost always" because there will be room for mid-round surprises.)
The other difference is that there will be more possibility of interfering with an action in progress... under the old rules, everything was assumed to happen more or less at once and any effects (like being defeated, or knocked off one's feet) didn't apply until the start of the next round. That was mainly intended to stop a bunch of cascading contingencies from making combat ever more complicated.
Why the change?
Well, as a minor note, grabbing advantage is such a huge... advantage... that optimizing characters/parties to do it as often as possible would probably be a pretty normal part of gameplay anyway. It would be a required first step for powergaming, and any group that didn't have at least one person who was optimized for tactics would be at a serious disadvantage. I'm not saying that game design decisions should be made to either placate or thwart munchkins, but it's not a bad thing to remove something from the game that feels like a requirement.
There are bigger reasons for the change, though:
- Simpler combat rules.
Everything about who has advantage and how to grab advantage can be thrown out. Any possible confusion between having tactical advantage and being "disadvantaged" (a catch-all term for being impaired or forced into an awkward position) is gone. - Better flow from the rest of the game into combat and back out again.
The instant a situation turns hostile, the GM can simply say what the enemies are doing and combat is begun without any set-up or rolling. If a player strikes the first blow in a situation where combat is not obviously imminent, that attack can be resolved and then the first actual round begins. No fuss, no muss. - Better flow within combat.
Each new round of combat begins as the old one ends, with no need to stop what you're doing and for everyone to roll dice to determine an abstract principle. If you'd just moved into position to strike, now you can strike. The need to break things up into rounds hasn't changed, but the disruptive impact of breaking it up has been lost. - Players will always have something to respond to.
Knowing what the enemy is going to try to do is an important tactical advantage, yes, but I also see it as a huge thing for an inexperienced or indecisive player. If you're not a tactical thinker or you're still getting into the swing of things, isn't knowing that one of the skeletons is coming at you with its axe probably going to be helpful in deciding what to do? Some people don't benefit from being told that they can do almost an infinite number of things with their character, compared to being told that a skeleton is going to swing an axe at their head and what do they want to do about that one particular thing.
This isn't to say that the players will simply be limited to reacting to what the GM does, because what happens in the next round is going to flow from what happened in this one. But even if the whole group is newbies, they'll have a set of discrete conflicts set up for them to address/resolve instead of just being told "You have initiative. There are eleven zombies. What do you do?" - Combat becomes more of a challenge for players to win or lose than a symmetrical conflict between the GM and the players.
The GM doesn't win the adventure as a whole by defeating the players... why treat combat as a game that they play against each other? This way combat is more of a story that the GM tells and the players affect by playing their own parts in it, which is really more of what I think it should be.