So I think it’s pretty well-established by now that we don’t need combat subsystems to run combat. See Justin here and here, whose posts I’m rather shamelessly ripping off. See a variety of games outside adventure ethos that don’t have them in the first place. Let’s talk about that.
Reasons to Use Combat Rules
The same reasons we use any rule in RPGs:
- The rule feels better than what we as a group could decide at the moment.
- The rule helps with specific genre or fiction emulation.
- The rule engages with the core loop of the game.
- The rule gives us aesthetic pleasure to interact as its own mini-game or board game.
- We want a rule to inject random fiction in the game even when we could do it on our own.
A good rule generally covers two of those, the first one being very essential.
So the reasons to use combat rules are:
- We don’t feel comfortable make rulings about combat simulation without explicit mechanics.
- We want a certain genre or narrative feel for combat, such as swashbuckling, and those rules help.
- We have a resource management loop that feels better served by combat as depletion.
- The combat rules are pleasing to interact independent of the fiction.
- Crit, Fumble and other tables bring fiction we couldn’t imagine at the moment.
Combat rules are like social rules, or rules for seafaring, or rules for tracking the mental state of a PC, or rules for gem cutting. You include if you don’t want to solve in your own during the heat of gaming or because you want something specific out of them. What’s interesting to me is how many adventure games introduce combat rules without an apparent reason, or while introducing already other mechanics that could be used for combat by themselves with proper guidance like skill checks. It happens even in PbtA, where sometimes you read someone’s hack and there’s a separate combat Move but there doesn’t seem to be much differentiation between that and general Moves around risk, outside “combat needs to be a separate thing by default”. Down to including obligatory Harm clocks in the sheets.
One reason we mess around so much with combat rules in spaces like the NSR design space seems to be: we want the combat to feel like problem solving instead of a resource management loop. This can be achieved by modifying it, sure, but even more by excluding.
But What About Equipment?
If you are doing this to any game, there’s the issue of equipment differentiation and lists.
Ask yourself: is your group composed of weapon and armor specialists? People who know the ins-and-outs of what every specific weapon brings to warfare? People that can bring that knowledge to decide on rulings about what effect an attacker and a defender would have? I have friends like that, and if you do, great! Keep a varied equipment list with all the different types of swords, maces, guns and such. The group will know what each one would bring to a situation beyond the obvious, genre assumptions.
If that isn’t the case, or that kind of simulation is not what the group is after even if they do have weapon knowledge, I suggest just classifying weapons as Type. A sword is… Sword. Doesn’t matter if it’s a shortsword, glaive, cutlass, schimitar, rapier, greatsword, whatever. Mechanically, and more importantly when you making rulings for their effectiveness, they are one and the same.
A Sword can be any kind of sword, but in practical terms it is a Sword. You may want that more expensive Swords make talking to bourgeois fucks easier because they see you have bling. However, the more expensive Sword won’t be better for rulings purposes in combat than the cheaper Sword. The more you try to differentiate between Swords in combat, unless your group is like the one I described, the more headaches you give yourself and the more you will go after separate combat rules, for damage dice/bonus, for reach math…
True weapon differentiation only comes when the weapon is special. There’s no difference in ruling an attack between a longsword and a greatsword, they’re both Swords. Excalibur is a Special Sword. The difference comes from being Excalibur. This method doesn’t need more than that. So when you are ruling a combat, the person with the Special Magic Sword will win unless the person using a Regular Sword brings something else. If the great Death Knight is not carrying a Special Sword, then his sword is just as good practically as the old sword the young squire is raising in a hurry. What makes a difference is that he is a Death Knight.
Weapon Type is applied according to the situation, not quality. Maces are better at crushing skeleton bones than Swords. Spears have better reach. All are harder to hide than Daggers, and Daggers could easily stack for you to carry many, but you don’t bring a knife to a sword fight. The benefits of something like non-variable damage in OD&D (everyone picks the weapon they prefer) with the flexibility of the specific weapon types bringing different things in a level people unfamiliar with real combat can understand through the use of genre.
So yeah, erase all your equipment lists and just turn things into their Type.
But what about weight and encumbrance? My group isn’t the weapon specialist type so we need some reference of effect for weight. Shouldn’t the heavier weapon have a bigger impact to compensate for the struggle of carrying?
That line of thought is backwards. It assumes weapon weight should be differentiated in the first place for play reasons, and then that this differentiation must matter in other ways to retroactively justify tracking different weights. Let’s ponder the following:
- Could I choose that weapons don’t count for encumbrance at all?
- Could I choose that all weapons count colectively the same for encumbrance? OD&D abstracts all miscellania equipment under the same collective weight, you can do it with all weapons.
- Could I choose that each weapon counts, but they weigh the same? A Sword, a Spear and a Mace are all Weight X each, no matter what they specifically represent in the fiction such as a greatsword or a pike. Different fictional weights can be justified by encumbrance tracking both the material weight of the object and how it’s being carried. Before you worry about Daggers, just think that their main advantage is that they can stack so you are never unprepared.
These options solve that issue more than trying to systematize, in my opinion. I apply the same thought for armor. You can have Light/Heavy Armor instead of three degrees (like World of Dungeons does, but you don’t attach a number), or, even better, you either have Armor or you don’t.
Combat in World of Dungeons
It’s fairly easier to do it than other OSR, sure, but as I said, even many PbtA keeps differentiating combat out of tradition, so it’s still a significant change.
By the presence of hit points, damage per weapon, Armor, suggested rounds, escalating damage by level and others, we presume we should use Dungeon World combat for WoDu. There’s other ways, sure. Vagabonds of Dyfed has good combat rules. You can use Maze Rats combat without much issue. There’s my suggestions for Tunnels & Trolls combat, and my Group Combat move inspired by Cavegirl.
Let’s talk about my two suggestions. Both of them aren’t necessary to rule combat, they’re just things that I, as ref, would find that add to the game because of their board gameness while still tying to problem solving, therefore related to the loop we want. They’re both fast and ask the players to do stunts and consistently inject fiction into it to gain advantage. Doing opposed rolls has a tactile pleasure for players. It doesn’t demand much of me. It covers most bases.
If I just wanted fast and not thinking much, I could just ask everyone to roll a bunch of d6s, no maneuvers or anything, and see which group survives and move on. That leads to a different game and doesn’t mesh with the problem-solving ethos like the others, but it still can work, by tying all the focus to the pre-engagement tactics (cornering enemies, traps, deciding if you run away). Or everyone just does a save and we see who died or not. Very practical. Boring combat is fine, after all.
All of those can work. But let’s remove World of Dungeons combat rules until they’re just like any other procedure: remove Hit Dice, Hit Points, increasing damage and others. Let’s use Position/Effect (or Risk/Reward) from Blades in the Dark as reference.
Player says what they want to do with the enemy. I say what the enemy wants to do to them. If they want something like instantly killing the opponent, they either will suffer death too in failure or they have leverage to prevent that. Partial success might mean that they both die, or that the player avoids death but ends in a worse position. Just a couple examples.
It isn’t much different from, say, ruling a social situation. Is intimidation the right approach for this NPC, considering what is the Obstacle they have to help the party? Yes? No? Sometimes combat won’t even demand a roll because there’s no risk. Likewise, combat skills and such are just an opportunity to say “you do the stuff” without having risk.
There’s no difference between combat, dealing with a trap or trying to secure an advantage in fiction.
I Don’t Play WoDu but Want to Get Rid of Combat Subsystems
First, you need to understand that these proposals may change significantly resource management loops in old school games and that a focus on problem solving becomes very important on a structural level of the conversation. They also require the change of advancement, or at least finding different functions for what remains in your other subsystems. Hit Points are pretty much excluded from all.
OD&D: you have Saving Throws, x-in-6 and, if absolutely necessary, Ability Checks. Set precedents for different types of danger and in combat situations just roll those. Determine what the player wants to do and what happens if they fail. I strongly suggest you take advantage of the binary nature of those rolls and rule that if the character fails, the monster succeeds in its intent to speed up and to make it coherent with what happens in other situations anyway. Saving Throws are going to be the most likely option: after all, if we accept that if we fail a Saving Throw against a trap we might die instantly, no reason to not treat the combat the same.
You can compare Ability Scores to determine the required roll, like the BRP Resistance Table or early GLoG, sure, but you can also use them as numerical reference to determine Level of Effect in the fiction.
(If using Ability Scores either as reference or to roll, I heavily suggest that you give some kind of benefit for low scores such as extra XP gain or an inverted Ability Requirement deal where lesser scores allow you to play more rare character types. Actually I suggest that in general for D&D but this is a particularly important situation for it).
I believe levels will become an issue of increasing ability scores (likely the Prime Attributes of each class), together with the major benefits of Saving Throw increase.
Into the Odd: you have the Luck Roll and the Save. The Luck Roll allows for some gradation of results for the conflict, including a result where you get what’s needed but suffers Score reduction anyway (I think you would have to halve the die damage to Scores). Advancement doesn’t change much in this family of games besides the Hit Protection removal.
Basic Roleplaying and Family: the opposed skill rolls as presented in Openquest are possibly the best frame of reference from ruling how the situations would come to pass, and possibly more directly compatible with the spirit of the rules than a Call of Cthulhu style single roll with modulating difficulty. Between Fumble, Failure, Success and Critical Success, there’s a lot of space to determine how an engagement goes in the fiction. The same Parry/Dodge penalty you experience using it multiple times in a round can easily be just a regular penalty to a skill roll dealing with many opponents.
I’m sure people will remember other games and think of how the subsystems already there can be used in replacement of combat.
Roll to Doubt 