How to spice up combat- The less rhetorical question

[Eric J.]

As some sortof recent threads in Actual play may or may not have said, I'm currently in my best campaign yet, Star Wars: Sins of the Father.  I'm using classic D6 Star Wars that's gone through several overhauls by yours trully.

The most realevant thing that I did was change the combat system to something I read from the 'Issis System' on the web.  Normally, in D6, you roll your defensive action for that round at the beginning.  However, in the 'Issis' system, you enter combat and roll your sword skill for initiative and use that to determine the order of attacks and for each parry that the opponent makes, they incure a -1D to all subsequent rolls.

Example: Jess and Heciv are fighting with swords.  They both have 3D into their swords skill.

Jess and Heciv roll for their initiative.  Jess gets an 8 and Heciv gets a 19.  Heciv elects to make 2 attacks and Jess makes but one.

Heciv gets to act on initiative value 19 and 9, while Jess gets to attack only on initiative value 8.

Heciv rolls 2D for his first attack (-1D for his additional attack), getting an 8.

Jess blocks with a 9, avoiding any damage.

Heciv rolls 2D for his next attack and gets a 6.

Jess blocks with a 10.

Now it's Jess's turn to attack and he does so at 1D because he lost 2 for having to block the first 2 attacks.  He rolls a 2.

Hesiv blocks with a 14.

The ony modification I made to this system is that I divided the 'Swords' skill into 3 seperate skills:

Attack
Block
Speed

This, IMHO, allows each character to better characterise themselves with their fighting skills.

Now, for the actual question... How do I spice up combat?  This system is balanced and makes for a lot of rolling (which is fun, BTW) but it still has the pitfalls of most combat systems:  The characters find the optimum action to take and they take it over and over again.

In most games there are bases in combat that change with time... The number of spells you have available, your HP amount, or they have drama mechanics that can change it considerably.

D6 doesn't.

In this dual system that I've implimented, most of the time it's better to just keep attacking than use a force ability or something else.

That doesn't mean that it's not enjoyable.  Far from it.  2 recent battles come to mind:

In a 1 on 1 session I had with one of my players his character (Evan) decided to join up with one of the main antagonists (Darth Janus aka Jason).  So Jason took him to a mundane space station and a foodcourt bar inside.  Jason was looking to get revenge on Master Keldor (who had saved Evan from Jason allegidly earlier in the campaign).  Jason started out the battle by shooting Master Keldor (who feigned death) and asking Evan to finish him off as the ultimate revenge.  Evan decided to help Keldor instead and did battle with Jason.  Jason was only trying to disarm him and eventually did (using a force point hehe).  Jason then went to kill Master Keldor but Evan threw his lightsaber to him and Keldor caught it and disabled Jason with 3 mighty swings (using a force point).  Jason then retreated from Master Keldor (for the second time in the campaign) by pointing the blaster at Evan and then slowly retreating.

This was interesting because it involved a moral choice; the dynamic wasn't to kill, but to injure; and the weapon dynamics changed.

I.E. because in character intentions changed the nature of the battle several times durring it.

The second recent one was a battle where several characters faught a giant spiderlike droid (anyone remember Johnny Quest?).  It was interesting because each character had a uniqe role in the battle (firing lasers, slicing the droid, or hacking its legs off).

Anyway, I can do interesting battles but more often then not it takes some inspiration on my part, or blind luck.

What're some Forge tips on spicing things up a bit?

May the wind be always at your back,
-Pyron

[Thor]

One of the things I have been trying to bring into our combat is a sense of movement we have been playing a renaissance setting and wanted the combat to be more movement oriented. instead of just blocking we also allowed giving ground as a way to avoid being skewered. It helps to have a layout but we ofter use dice on the table and books for walls when we need to. We haven't gotten anything yet worth hauling out but have had a few sessions where there was no D20 toe to toe combat. Just a suggestion.

[Eric J.]

What mechanics did you impliment to encourage movement in combat?

May the wind be always at your back,
-Pyron

[Andrew Martin]

What're some Forge tips on spicing things up a bit?

Design system so as to encourage and reward players to "spice things up"! :)

As you can see with your own eyes, your fellow players are obeying the system rules, making multiple attacks and parrys and blocks. Because the rules for movement don't interact well with melee combat and don't reward movement in combat in any way, the players don't move their characters around. So you can see that combat using the system doesn't look like the movie sources.

So what you need to do, is to design the system to reward players that have their characters move around as per the movies.

Here's one suggestion that might work within the limits of your existing system. The Acrobatics skill and Dex attribute could be used as an additional defensive skill. To encourage players to use Acrobatics in combat, emphasize that this skill and attribute aren't reduced by other actions that are used to attack or defend with like Melee and Lightsaber combat. For example, that would mean that if Jess had chosen to use Acrobatics instead of block, his character's attack skill wouldn't have been reduced.

[Thor]

We gave the option of giving ground as a way of avoiding damage (this was a fencing example in our case). Like a light version of RoS (which we had read about but not aquired at that time) we had a system where the player starts the round with a number of action points and can spend them on moves that cost and moves that gather more points. Moves that gather points are things like holding or taking the other guys measure, things that cost points are things like attack. This led in the first incarnation to the Toe to Toe sort of combat we were trying to avoid so we added a rule that the character could back off for free. there were instances where if the player did not back off damage would ensue. this was quite cool because backing your character correctly to put yourself into a better position rather than a worse position became a great deal of fun. the system broke down when we tried to ramp it up to multiple combatants (more than two) and we switched to a couple of different games for the summer. I would like to come back to this some time, it was fun running each other around the room. It was sort of like endgame chess where the better player has limited the others moves. I don't think that it is everything I want in a combat system but it is certainly a great feature.

[Eric J.]

This is interesting.  Actually, I think that I've made enough modifications to D6 that I need to start another thread.  I wanted this one to be about generic things you can do to spice up combat.  Hate to start so many threads consecutively, but I'll try to call it self-moderation and get away with it.

May the wind be always at your back,
-Pyron

[Doctor Xero]

What're some Forge tips on spicing things up a bit?

In the old Champions superhero game, we found several methods for spicing up combat encounters.

First, we emphasized rules which encouraged the sort of swashbuckling actions we wanted in the game.  Some were already inherent to the rules -- for example, the Champions Acrobatics skill gives a +3 to Defensive Combat Value.  Some were more enthusiastic use of nonspecific bonuses (e.g. surprise bonuses) available in the game -- for example, the game master ruled that swinging on chandeliers always netted a bonus to Defensive Combat Value rather than a penalty, thereby explaining why swinging on a chandelier somehow makes it easier for a superhero to avoid machine gun fire.

Second, we always followed the random-bonus-for-good-roleplay-description approach found in the Champions game.  So a player who went out of his or her way to describe in exciting terms how the player-character fought benefitted in the mechanics as well as in the social lauding we gave good roleplay.  Sometimes, after really good description, the players would turn to the game master and declare that the player should automatically succeed without rolling any dice after such a cool description!

Third, our game master always modelled for us the sort of energetic combat we all were after.  It's really hard to have fun describing your player-character bouncing around and dodging-parrying-thrusting if none of the NPCs react and all the villains follow the same boring tactics themselves.

Fourth, our game master was fond of "mystery weaknesses", so it always paid to try something new against a villain.  The "mystery weakness" could be something as exotic as a vulnerability to anything colored yellow to something as real world as having difficulty defending one side due to not-immediately-apparent vision problems.

Finally, we all accepted that there was one beloved player who would never be creative in combat because he really couldn't think in those terms.  He more than carried his creative weight in other areas, so we just smiled and indulged him and loved him all the same.

I hope these help!

Doctor Xero