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Another post about combat systems, just to get an idea...

Started by Demonspahn, September 17, 2002, 08:23:25 PM

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Demonspahn

Am I the _only_ one that frequents this site that has a group that:

a. Is still having fun after almost ten years of playing with the same group of core players?  

b. Enjoys combat or some type of conflict/confrontation in an RPG, usually once a night?

c. Enjoys the Storyteller system (with a few house mods)?

d. Doesn't mind a game with a hit/health point system?

e1. Doesn't bother to question whether a game has too many rules for combat---if the setting is appealing we just play it how we want to play it

AND

e2. Probably wouldn't play a game for long that did _not_ have some sort of detailed and concise combat system?  


A lot has been stated lately about not having special/detailed combat systems in RPGs and this seems to be cropping up more and more in the design of some games, mostly "independent" games.  It seems the thought is that combat systems are included because designers have been conditioned into thinking that's what gamers want but _is_ it conditioning or is that really what the majority of gamers want _and_ enjoy?  And if so, is that necessarily a bad thing?  

OK, so this post is kind of half joke/half serious.  I was just reading some comments and started feeling left out.  A lot of things/games that I enjoy playing get routinely slammed here and I was wondering if I was the only one.   Sound off if I'm not!  :)

Pete

Mike Holmes

Hee, I love answering these.

Quote from: DemonspahnAm I the _only_ one that frequents this site that has a group that:

a. Is still having fun after almost ten years of playing with the same group of core players?  
I am.

Quoteb. Enjoys combat or some type of conflict/confrontation in an RPG, usually once a night?
Everybody falls into this category.

Quotec. Enjoys the Storyteller system (with a few house mods)?
I do recently. I call it TROS >Ducks to avoid thrown object from Jake<

Quoted. Doesn't mind a game with a hit/health point system?
Guess my long running Rolemaster campaign counts.

Quotee1. Doesn't bother to question whether a game has too many rules for combat---if the setting is appealing we just play it how we want to play it
Well, I do likes my settingses. I usually strip them and move them about from system to system, however.

AND

Quotee2. Probably wouldn't play a game for long that did _not_ have some sort of detailed and concise combat system?  
Got me there. I play them a lot. Are you saying that you would play one for a while, then? Interesting...

QuoteA lot has been stated lately about not having special/detailed combat systems in RPGs and this seems to be cropping up more and more in the design of some games, mostly "independent" games.  It seems the thought is that combat systems are included because designers have been conditioned into thinking that's what gamers want but _is_ it conditioning or is that really what the majority of gamers want _and_ enjoy?  And if so, is that necessarily a bad thing?
Players have been conditioned by the games available. Not vice versa. Show me all the early non-combat system games that were ignored by the gaming public in favor of the ones with combat systems.

QuoteOK, so this post is kind of half joke/half serious.  I was just reading some comments and started feeling left out.  A lot of things/games that I enjoy playing get routinely slammed here and I was wondering if I was the only one.   Sound off if I'm not!  :)
Why are you feeling left out? Didn't you get in on that cool thread on Automatic weapons? Don't you hang out in the TROS forum and make up weapons with us? Want to make the most combat intensive game known to man? I'm there for ya. Don't want all those weekends in the military to go to waste; I probably do need to hone my combat makin' skillz.

Are you saying that you don't like the games that have been coming out lately that don't have combat systems? Like a couple of mine? Well, that's too bad. But it takes all sorts. I have nothing against your preference, why do you have a problem with mine?

Or aer you experiencing some cognative dissonance? Its OK to take the pill....

Mike
Member of Indie Netgaming
-Get your indie game fix online.

Walt Freitag

Pete, I was right with you up through d. But e1 and e2 don't describe me at all, for many reasons.

If I'm making house mods or thinking about making them, then I am questioning whether the game's combat rules are right (too many, or too few, or wrong ones).

If the setting is appealing, but not the system, I go home and make up my own similar setting and choose or invent a different system for it. I don't buy settings. I do buy systems that are well-suited for settings.

I have no reservations about playing a game without a detailed combat system. For a fifteen year period, almost all my role playing was indoor LARP, where combat systems were usually something like "Everybody has a number. If you get into a fight, the higher number wins," or "If you have a gun and want to shoot someone, stick a red adhesive dot on the target."

Works great, especially that red dot thing. Most realistic gunfire system I've ever played. Sure, it means guns have no range and are all the same. But that's trivia. The red adhesive dot has a sudden deadliness that no method of manipulating dice and symbols could come near achieving. Players would stare at their "wounds" in total psychological shock.

I've considered using this "mechanism" in a modern or future tabletop RPG setting. The gunfire rules would be something like this:

1. If you shoot something, it dies.

2. If something shoots you, you die.

I don't think this quite meets your "detailed and concise" criteria, but in the right system and setting it would work fine.

- Walt
Wandering in the diasporosphere

Demonspahn

Mike,

Whoa, calm down.  I'm not knocking anyone's gaming preference and/or game, I was just asking if there was anyone else who felt/played the same way we do.

By no means am I saying I don't like the games coming out, just saying that me and my particular group probably wouldn't play one for a long period of time.   Universalis for instance, from what I've read sounds like a great and fun game to play, and I think we would probably enjoy it as a changeup.  But from night to night over the long run I think my players would rather have their own personal characters to create and develop.  Like you said, maybe that has to do with player conditioning but conditioning or not, it's what we enjoy so why struggle to change it?  

I guess what I'm getting at is that I eat pizza.  When my wife wants me to eat some crazy Thai dish she cooked up, I'll eat it, I may even like it, but given the choice I would probably just want pizza again because I like pizza---and is that such a bad thing?

What I'm getting from your post(s?) is that a combat system is completely unecessary unless the game itself is based around a combat intensive game.  I just don't agree with that.  My players like to develop their characters' personalities/motivations and they like to mix it up a bit with the bad guys here and there.  I think for the most part that it's up to the group to decide how they want to play a particular game, even those like D&D which gives most XP for combat.  

Hmm, this is starting to cross into different territory.  It seems like I read an article (here?) about how systems and settings should complement each other and the style of play.  Going to look for that article now.


Walt,

I'm the opposite here in that I buy settings rather than systems.  I feel I can adapt whatever system I like/my players are comfortable with.  For a long time we used a modified version of the Storyteller system until we switched to a home brew which worked better for us.

I agree that the lethal red dot system would work in the right game but again, that's generally not the type of game my players would enjoy over the long term.  They enjoy combat/conflict/confrontation as well as character development and a Bang! your character is now dead type of game would quickly lose its appeal.

---

Again, I wasn't attacking anyone's style of play or their games, just wondering if there were others who felt/played the same way we do.  

Pete

Walt Freitag

QuoteBang! your character is now dead

You seem to be assuming that the system I describe would result in a lot of character deaths. Is this why you see it as unappealing? Actually, there is no automatic relation between the lethality of a system and the chance of characters being killed. If for example gunfire is automatically lethal, the emphasis of play shifts from "how can I win this gunfight?" to "how can I resolve this situation without anyone shooting me?"

Let me offer two analogies for this. First, suppose you had a setting where there were large pools of molten lava everywhere. No matter what system you're playing, falling into a pool of molten lava tends to be fatal. There are two things you could do about it. One possibility is to create an elaborate molten-lava survival system, with various kinds of tools (asbsestos clothing, heat-reflecting shields), variable lava characteristics (viscosity, temperature, blurpiness), applicable stats and abilities (heat resistance, cool minty breath, hot-footin'-it), and a resolution procedure that gives you lots of chances to work your way toward survival in a tactically interesting way.

The tradition of fantasy RPGs has been to treat combat the way I just described treating falling into molten lava. Make it complex, give everyone tools and stats and abilities, make it a lot more survivable than it should be even in the heroic genres they were mimicking. Nothing wrong with that.

Or, you could accept that falling into the lava is fatal and have the characters put priority into not falling in. That approach is just as valid, for combat as well as for lava. There are large and interesting genres in which guns and even swords are consistently lethal to both sides, not just to the mooks.

Which brings me to my second analogy: one of those Old Star Trek vs. New Star Trek (TNG) comparisons. In OST, there was a very limited budget for optical effects like phaser blasts. Whether for that reason or for reasons of dramatic tradition, pretty much every time a phaser was "set to kill" and fired at a person on OST, it either failed to have any effect, or it killed someone. "Missing" was never an issue. Varying amounts of "resistance" or "damage" were never issues, though some types of target proved to be totally invulnerable. Any normal humanoid shot with a "set to kill" phaser died. I'm not such a trekkie that I can guarantee that Captain Kirk never once dodged out of the way of a phaser beam, but I can't remember any such scenes. (He did dodge lots of thrown pointy sticks, though.) The same applies to other OST weapons of demonstrated or implied lethality: sonic blasters, alien transformation devices, even the machine guns in the gangsters episode.

Fast forward to TNG. Cheaper better special effects, cheaper worse writers, and suddenly half the episodes are being resolved with a big phaser firefight down on the cargo deck. An improvement? No. A decline? Many think so, but it could just be a matter of taste.

Is either of these styles inferior to the other or less likely to hold most players' interest over the long term? I really don't think so.

- Walt
Wandering in the diasporosphere

Demonspahn

Hi Walt,

Again, I'm mainly talking about my own group here.  I'm not saying the mechanic you described is bad or unappealing---I'm just saying that for us (my group) in a long term campaign, a game with a combat system where whoever is struck first, dies just would not work.  

A system that is too lethal would seem to discourage combat and shift the focus to "how can I resolve this situation without getting shot" like you said.  Few people would want to engage in combat for fear of character death.  But we enjoy combat---not as the focus of the game itself, but certainly as an element of the whole.   It's just that over the long term, we wouldn't play a game that was completely combat oriented any more than we would play one that was totally centered around some other concept, be it photography, intrigue, or what have you.  We would (and do) play these kinds of games as a change of pace however.  
Maybe I'm getting this all turned around but I get the impression sometimes here that games should have a narrow focus and that anything not relevant to the actual premise of the game should be thrown out of the rules.  Therefore, things like combat in particular should be an all or nothing thing---if the game is about cooking pasta, there should be no extra rules for what happens when Nana cracks you with her wooden spoon.  While this sounds good in theory, like I said, my group would want more definitive results for a long term campaign.

I might be derailing my own thread here.  Has anyone previously discussed a comparison between long and short term campaigns and how they relate to broad and narrowly focused RPGs?

---
Also, Mike, rereading my previous posts, in case I came off the wrong way I just want to reiterate that I was in no way attacking or belittling anyone's game, I was just stating the style of play that my particular group enjoys and wondering if we were in the minority here.  

Thanks,

Pete

----

EDITED to include:

Walt, Re: Star Trek, I have long been amused by the regression in phaser/disruptor technology---did they even try to explain the difference?  

Personally, I like the new firefights, but perhaps that goes right along with this whole thread.

M. J. Young

Quote from: Pete a.k.a. DemonspahnWhat I'm getting from your post(s?) is that a combat system is completely unecessary unless the game itself is based around a combat intensive game.  I just don't agree with that.
I think that's not what anyone is saying.

I think what I'm reading is that an independent and elaborate system for combat is completely unnecessary unless the game is intended to be combat intensive. That's not the same thing.

Let's assume we've designed a typical combat-oriented role playing game.  It has bonuses and penalties for a wealth of skills and equipment, rules about tracking ammo, targeting opponents, defending against attacks, and more.  Just about anything you can imagine doing in real combat has an analog in the game.  Now let's suppose that while you're playing this game, one of the characters wants to bake a cake for someone's birthday.  What are you going to do?  Probably you're going to find the catch-all standard resolution for actions not covered under specific rules and roll the dice to determine how it came out.

Now let's suppose we've created this mythical cooking RPG everyone always mentions. It has detailed rules about ingredients, cook times, pots and pans, washing up, oven temperatures, until just about anything you can imagine doing in a real kitchen has an analog in the game.  Now let us suppose that the cook gets so angry at one of the customers he grabs the meat cleaver and storms out into the dining room intending to kill the man.  What are you going to do?  Probably, once again, you're going to find the catch-all standard resolution for actions not covered under specific rules and roll the dice to determine how it came out.

The important thing to note here is that no one thinks for a moment that the combat game needs to have detailed rules for how to make a cake; but if you suggest that the cooking game doesn't need detailed rules covering combat, suddenly people are up in arms about what will you do if a fight breaks out.  But if you give combat special treatment in the cooking game, you would be saying that you expect combat to be a significant enough part of normal activities in your fantasy kitchen that it needs coverage--just as if in your combat RPG you include detailed cooking rules, you're suggesting that players should be involved in the preparation of their regular meals quite a bit.

A decent RPG should be able to resolve any action any character within that world is capable of doing; but it doesn't need to have detailed rules about all such actions if they aren't expected to be a significant part of play.  We could create extremely detailed rules about swimming, including treading water, holding your breath, lifesaving maneuvers, backstroke versus sidestroke versus breastroke versus crawl, speed and stamina, diving and surface diving, and much more.  Neither of our imagined games above need any such rules; if in either game swimming becomes part of the story, we fall back on the catch-all system.

Does that clarify things?

Personally, I prefer to avoid combat; but I like to have a system that gives me strategic flexibility when it comes.

--M. J. Young

Demonspahn

QuoteI think what I'm reading is that an independent and elaborate system for combat is completely
                 unnecessary unless the game is intended to be combat intensive. That's not the same thing.

M.J.,

Yeah, I think I'm _finally_ getting that.  What I have somehow been failing to see all along was the "independent and elaborate" part of the discussion.  

I think that combat systems should work the same as the game's task resolution system.  Of course I'm not against all the additional modifiers and rules tweaks that come into play to (arguably) simulate the variability of combat situations.   I think this is because of the lethality issue.  Players want to give their character every chance of survival---fail a cooking roll and you burn the toast; fail a combat roll and your character might die.  

Anyway, I'm starting to feel like someone who overheard half a phone conversation and couldn't wait to put his $.02 in.  :)

Pete