When does combat resolution become too slow?

[Dauntless]

My system currently has quite a few factors to be considered during the play of combat.  Most of it also requires quite a bit of record keeping.  While I haven't playtested it yet, I know that it's going to be fairly slow, if only because my system has more detail than the Phoenix Command combat system for ranged weapons, and more detail than Riddle of Steel for melee combat...both of which are on the upper level of complexity for combat resolution times.

Now, Riddle of Steel manages to keep the players interest because of all the tactical decision making.  In other words the breadth of choice while prolonging resolution time is also what makes the system more interesting (for those that like such detail).  But all the tactical choices have bearing on the imagined scene and highlights the visceral imagery of the story.  If the extra time only involves looking up data charts (like Phoenix Command required) then I think it might detract from the "fun factor" of the combat resolution.

I realize this is a somewhat subjective question because some people like quick and dirty combat resolution that sacrifices realism for quickness or drama.  I'm gearing this combat resolution system to be very simulationist, so I'm including quite a bit of detail for two purposes.  The primary purpose is to extract the most relevant elements of combat which  A) provide interesting tactical decisions and B) have important effects on the success or failure of the task.  The second purpose is to create enough tactical choice that the imagery of what's actually going on is not so broad or generic as to lose flavor, but not so overwhelming as to try to account for every single possible variation on a manuever.  With this goal in mind, when does combat become too slow even when trying to stress the detail required by a more simulationist approach?

[TonyLB]

Do you want to approach tactical decisions over time?  i.e. spend resources now and you won't have them to spend later, and similar questions?  Or are all the tactical decisions meant to be isolated to their current moment?

[Callan S.]

I'm not sure when its too much, but I can suggest a gauging method.

Look at the factors involved here:
Looking up and resolving rules results
Supplying rich and evocative descriptions of results
(I wont go into tactical option factors just yet)

Basically rate the two from one to ten, ten highest. Rate them at any point during rules resolution, in terms of how much each is happening.

'Supplying rich and evocative descriptions of results' MUST beat 'Looking up and resolving rules results'. It simply must have a higher rating.

I suspect that with a sim appreciating crowd, you could take thirty minutes to establish where a single bullet went, and they would be thrilled all the way. BUT you need to keep that 'Supplying rich and evocative descriptions of results' above the other factor, all the way through.

The thing is, how much can you get out of a bullets flight (or even a burst of bullets)? I think a fair bit, but you'll run dry fairly soon. So your going to have to face the fact that when the rating for 'Supplying rich and evocative descriptions of results', the 'Looking up and resolving rules results' must be at a lower number to that, so as to let the other factor win. How big and contact needy your rules can get will not be based on realism, but on 'Supplying rich and evocative descriptions of results'. I suspect this may be shock when your goal might have been the faithful rendition of reality. But much like a tree falling in a forrest that nobody hears, no matter how faithful that rendition is, if your group doesn't get to experience it, it didn't happen and doesn't matter.

[Andrew Martin]

With this goal in mind, when does combat become too slow even when trying to stress the detail required by a more simulationist approach?

I've written up a fast, "realistic" combat system, that has firearm weapon damage based on figures from BTRC's "Guns, Guns, Guns!", achieves realistic results in very low times (times in actual play were under a minute to resolve a shot, IIRC, and combat encounters were from ten to a hundred times as fast as AD&D combat), and intentionally limited PC and player information to further speed play and produce realistic behaviour in players.

So it's possible to be very fast and be very "realistic" at the same time. Unfortunately, there comes a point where the system became so complex that I couldn't write down the latest version of the system, as I couldn't explain it well enough for myself, let alone teach it to players. Have a look at my post here: http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?p=133914#133914 where I explain more.

[Dauntless]

TonyLB-
That's a good question.  I think I've built the system to favor allocating your resources early to avoid them later, but it's possible to do them as you go along.

The way I've structured the flow of combat, everything is chained together in a very consistent and logical way.  I use an open-ended continuous Action Phase system in which all actions have a Phase cost associated with it (one of the time eaters since players are going to want to calculate how long an action takes before they committ to it).  You start on the phase dicated by your Reflexes and keep adding on the Action costs ad infinitum.  There's also rules for hesitation, confusion, wounds, hastiness and other modifers that either affect the phase cost of an action, or which create "pauses" in the flow of your action.  Perhaps more importantly, your actions must be written down after your previous action is declared.  When the previous action's phase comes up and is completed, you must reveal what you wrote down as the next action (and then write down what your next action will be...etc etc.).  You can switch to a different action, say for example to dodge an unexpected attack, but this will take a penalty.

By chaining together the actions and requiring the player to do a little forethought by writing out his next action, it provides for a certain continuity of action.  

There are certain pools of resources that you have.  Exertion, Focus, and Discpline are the most important.  You allocate these to your actions to affect the odds.  But once expended you have to wait until they get refreshed, which takes a variable amount of time (and the amount it gets refreshed is also variable).  Hence, you have to do some quick judging to figure out when and where to allocate your tactical resources to its best advantage.  However, this decision making is one of those things thats going to increase the time to resolve combat.  Not only do you have these tactical resources, but you have to figure out certain States the character is in (Damage, Fatigue, Emotional and Mental Stability...ie. morale and awareness).

In some regards I'm not too worried about the time it takes.  After a month of playing Phoenix Command I got to the point where I could resolve a firefight with 5 players pretty quickly.  Ditto for the Hero system which is one of the more crunchy systems out there.  But I'm sure people will look at all the rules and go, "Oh my God, he's got to be kidding.  This is a pen and paper RPG, not a computer game!" and not even bother to give it a chance thinking it will be too unwieldy.  Then again, what should I care.....I'll be giving away the core rules for free :)  I'll only be charging for the background material.

[Dauntless]

Andrew-

...and intentionally limited PC and player information to further speed play and produce realistic behaviour in players.

Now this is interesting.  I have a few ideas in mind for this as well, but I haven't quite figured out exactly how to implement.  But I think information hiding is the key to solving the majority of min-maxers, munchkins and rules-lawyers.  I hadn't really thought of it though as a means to expedite the resolution process.  I'll look at my mechanics and see if there's a way to do this as well.

I'll take a gander at your ideas tomorrow....2am is too late for my brain to digest much anymore :)

[TonyLB]

Okay, what I'm seeing here (correct me if I'm wrong) is that you have scads and scads of resources over time, starting with Action Phases and adding in Exertion, Focus, Discipline, Damage, Fatigue, Emotional Stability and Mental Stability.

I don't know Phoenix Command, but compare (for instance) against first edition Hero, which had only Stun, Endurance and occasionally Body.  Even in 1e Hero there was very little incentive to save Endurance, because it was extremely rare for a fight to last long enough for that decision to reap any benefit... I played for more than a decade, and I literally never saw a villain be outlasted by a more conservative hero.

Now the reason for that (as I'm sure Champions players will leap to tell me) is that nobody actually tracked Endurance.  Which is, in fact, my point.  Players will, consciously or unconsciously, throw away pieces of your system until it runs quickly enough for them.

I think that if you want to track this many variables over time, and you want the players interested in them, your system will have to be very, very fast indeed.  Much faster than Hero or D&D.  Otherwise people are going to start ignoring things (starting, I'd guess, with Fatigue and Emotional/Mental Stability) because the game doesn't reinforce those elements being important within a single session of the game.

Anyway, there's my two cents.

[Jack Aidley]

I realize this is a somewhat subjective question because some people like quick and dirty combat resolution that sacrifices realism for quickness or drama.

I think this is an utterly false dicotomy. There is no relation between speed of resolution and realism of results - if anything; the more detailed your combat system the less likely it is to be realistic.

I'm gearing this combat resolution system to be very simulationist, so I'm including quite a bit of detail for two purposes.

It seems to me what you're describing here is not simulationist, but heavily gamist - it concentrates on player skill rather than character skill. Which is not, of course, a bad thing - but I think you should be clear about what your goals are and what you are suggesting will achieve.

It terms of designing a tactical combat system, I encourage you to tend towards visual representations. For example, D&D combat is pretty tedious until you bring out the minatures when it all of a sudden becomes a whole load more interesting and easier to track. By using visual tracking methods you will a) make it more interesting to play and b) make it easier and less tedious to track the details. On the otherhand I find that visual systems reduce immersion.

[Dauntless]

Jack Aidley-

if anything; the more detailed your combat system the less likely it is to be realistic.

And I believe this to be a false dichotomy.  People tend to get the notion in their head that once a system becomes more detailed, the more rigid and hence less flexible it becomes.  By this logic, no game rule can account for every possible contingency and possibility and therefore the more detailed it becomes the less able it is to cope with the unexpected.  

Hogwash.  

When you have a game which is less detailed and more abstract or generic you simply use whatever basic action the game system provides, and you fill in the details with your imagination.  And yet for some reason, because these rules are "lite", no one thinks twice that you are stretching the conventions of the rules to account for the flexibility.  The same goes for a detailed rules system.  If you encounter situations that don't quite fit the bill, then you let your imagination fill in the gap.  Detailed rules systems are not meant to smother imagination, rather they are there to provide more concrete descriptions of what normally goes on.  The advantage to this is that there is less ambiguity to the majority of cases.

Here's an example, let's say that your basic game system only has a basic punch and a kick.  Fair enough.  Now let's say mine has a hook, jab, uppercut, side kick, flying kick, snap kick and rotating kick (BTW, my system doesn't do this at all, in fact, it's incredibly freeform and describes melee combat by its implementation and purpose...there are no fixed techniques in my game).  Now, let's say that a player has the brilliant idea of wanting to do a flying spin kick to his opponent.  Well, in the basic game, all you've got is a kick...no big deal.  It's a kick.  You can fudge a little and give it more damage but a harder to hit modifier.  But now you think...aha!! See, the detailed game was trying to be clever and account for all these possibilities but it didn't include this one!!  For some reason, people are indifferent to fudging things for rules-lite, but feel that a detailed system is a failure if it didn't cover what they wanted to do.  Instead, just fill in the blanks like you would with a basic system.  The difference between the two approahces is that there will be less occasions where you will have to fudge things to account for the unexpected, and you will have more examples to have as guidelines to decide on how to fill in those blanks.

As for whether my system seems more gamist or simulationist, I have to admit to a profound ignorance of the precise meanings of the terms.  From what I am able to understand, it seemed to me that Gamism focuses on the playability aspect with an eye towards the goal of play balance in order to set up "victory conditions" (how the victory conditions are achieved are dependant on the system and setting).  Simulationism to me seemed to be about....well, simulating things, irregardless of play balance or victory conditions.  It's job was more to allow for creating "what if" scenarios that were consistent and tried to answer the question, "if you were in my shoes...".

That's why I'm trying to model elements based on how things operate....how the cause and effect relationships are tied together.  I'm really not too worried about play balance and victory conditions.  For example, in my game, you can play a Combat Android which are pretty nasty all the way around.  Extremely intelligent, stronger than the strongest augmented humans, and capable of learning new skills in a heartbeat.  While they have a few disadvantages, it doesn't compensate for all their advantages.  If that's what you want to play because you are intrigued by wondering what it would be like to play a combat android, then that's what you should be able to play without having to dumb it down through play-balance so that it's on even footing with a bioroid.  My focus has always been on, "If I have these capabilities, and I do this...what kind of results can I achieve?".

[Dauntless]

TonyLB-
Yeah you got it right.  There's several different pools of resources that you allocate at any phase during the game.  The only limit is how much of your resources you have left...but as long as you have them, you can use them whenever you want.

I know what you mean about the END problem in the Hero system.  If players and the GM want to skip some information to make the game speed along, more power to them.  So even though my game may have a lot of things to keep track of and consider, the players can deal with what they like.  Hopefully once I get everything nailed down, I can playtest it to see how it really works.

I guess that's what I like about detailed rules systems.  It's far easier to ignore and throw out what you find non-useful than it is to try to have to make something up on the spot without any guidance.  My philosophy has always been that the rules are not set in stone, and that the gamers should have the freedom to pick and chose what they want.  More detail to me means greater freedom of choice...not less freedom as many of the rule-lite crowd seem to think.

[Vaxalon]

To me, handling time in excess of fifteen seconds for one combat action is too much.  I like the way 3.0/3.5 DnD handles it, where you can pretty much throw your to-hit die and your damage dice together, and you only really raise the handling time if you get a critical.  That puts the handling time, most of the time, around ten seconds.  A big melee with dozens of combatants at a time takes about a half hour to resolve FTF, about an hour over IRC.

Another thing to consider in handling time is the "whose turn is it?" effect.  If you know (either all the time, or in one combat) who comes before you, things move faster; if you don't (such as if you're rolling for initiative every round) it slows things down a lot.

[Shreyas Sampat]

Dauntless, I think that you're attacking something Jack never said, and I don't think, interpreted in the manner that your response implies, Jack's post makes any sense.

However, if you look at a detailed system as an accumulation of rules that attempt to describe conditions, and assume that the game designer has some finite, imperfect ability to describe these conditions, you will see that each rule/detail makes the game as a whole more likely to describe unrealistic conditions, because it adds to the probability that some rule is just wrong, or some application of a rule fails, or some interaction produces undesired results. This is the reason all those "Murphy's Rules" threads on rpgnet and the like are filled with oddities from Hero, various versions of D&D, and other historically crunchy games. More crunch means more places for your rules to go wrong.

[John Kim]

Each rule/detail makes the game as a whole more likely to describe unrealistic conditions, because it adds to the probability that some rule is just wrong, or some application of a rule fails, or some interaction produces undesired results. This is the reason all those "Murphy's Rules" threads on rpgnet and the like are filled with oddities from Hero, various versions of D&D, and other historically crunchy games. More crunch means more places for your rules to go wrong.

Well, this can be more simply put -- more rules means more places for your rules to be wrong.  This is absolutely true, but it is also an empty argument in my opinion.  Actually, I consider it to be a rules-lite fallacy -- that doing nothing is better than having mistakes.  The faulty logic puts more burden of responsibility on the players/GM, then when things go wrong it's their fault rather than the designer's.

I feel that a game is just as responsible for things it doesn't provide as for things it does provide.  Rules-lite games can still be good, but they aren't good simply by virtue of being rules-lite.

[DannyK]

Well, the number of interactions *between* rules goes up exponentially as the number of rules increases, but that doesn't really say whether the game is good or bad.  

My question is this: given that additional complexity usually means more time spent resolving combat, what good stuff does this system provide to make that time well spent?  Let me add that "realism" is such a poorly defined word that it's better avoided in these discussions, IMO.

[Shreyas Sampat]

Well, this can be more simply put -- more rules means more places for your rules to be wrong.  This is absolutely true, but it is also an empty argument in my opinion.  Actually, I consider it to be a rules-lite fallacy -- that doing nothing is better than having mistakes.  The faulty logic puts more burden of responsibility on the players/GM, then when things go wrong it's their fault rather than the designer's.

Oh, sure. I wasn't argiung for diet game design by any means, I was simply explicating what I percieved to be Jack's point, which I don't believe that Dauntless answered in his post about omitted options.

(Notwithstanding my belief that added rules have a strong tendency to be fatty, unnecessary rules, and it takes very exacting design to be sure when a rule is fat and when it isn't.)