Working on a "realistic" Medieval combat system

[JQP]

I'm just kicking around ideas.  Please dear God no essays on theory, the definition of "realism," existentialism, etc.  And I don't care about being innovative, at ALL.  I just want to throw around some mechanics and see what works for me.

That said, in a nutshell my goal is to come up with a combat system that has a realistic feel, grim and gritty, without being plodding or too complex.  Some complexity is okay, because I want combat to be quick and deadly, and thus relatively rare (i.e., it might take longer to run a round but there will be far fewer exchanges than a D&D combat, and combat will be rarer since players will tend to avoid the risk).

I'm thinking I'll drop this thing into a somewhat heavily modified WFRP2 setting, but that might change in future.  And I'm going to keep TRoS (and any other similarly historically and reality minded RPG brought to my attention) somewhere in the back of my mind at all times.

Goals:

Only Fools Rush In

The cat-and-mouse element of "duels."  I lost the GD-ed German longsword fencing DVD I bought years ago, but I remember the C&M bit, where "duelists" (i.e., 1 on 1 as opposed to full on group melee) circled, angled for position, blended from stance to stance looking for advantage, etc.  This is cool and allows a system to somewhat mitigate the deadliness of realism and the fun of unrealism; combatants aren't actually hacking at one another so there's nothing unrealistic about the protraction, but players get a bit of extra "beef" in combat too.  So, I want to do something in the mechanics to reflect this.

He Who Dares, Wins

That said, it seems pretty well established amongst ARMA types that the attacker has the advantage.  This makes sense, even if I can only back it up on an abstract level, or with analogies (football teams practically always take the kickoff when they win the toss, presumably for good reason - they get to control how the game starts, get the initiative vis-a-vis scoring, etc)

Armor

It's there for a reason, and it's much more important than in RPGs, in my experience.  An experienced fighter in good plate is a Man's Job, and I want that reflected.  On the other hand, weapons vs. armor was an arms race, so the balance is probably going to be very tricky.  I'd appreciate anything anyone can add to the info found in this thread (including calling BS on info therein):

http://www.myarmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=4427

So far this is my armor list:

Soft Leather
Hard Leather (Cuir Bolli)
Padded/Gambeson/Arming Jacket
Scale
Maille (might need to differentiate maille quality)(Hauberk, Byrnie, etc.)
Lamellar/Klibanion (Byzantine Lamellar, often worn over Mail)
Brigandine/Coat-of-Plates
Plate

I think I have the order of preference/efficacy right.  Anyone want to take a stab at quantifying the distances?  E.g., rate them on a scale of 1-10 (or whatever) vs. bludgeoning, piercing, cutting?

I think I like TRoS' stance that all attacks are "called shots," which dovetails nicely with my desire to have armor at the per-body-part level.


Basic vs. Advanced Combat

This is even less thought-out than the above, but I was thinking maybe of having Basic and Advanced combat.  Basic would serve in the pell-mell of melee (can't get too fancy or you'll hit your mates, no room to spin in a narrow dungeon corridor, etc.), and even in more focused "duels" for those who don't want to use Advanced, whereas Advanced combat would be for more dramatic or important engagements by those who want to use it.  This could be as simple as using optional stuff like maneuvers, stances, repartee, murder blows, etc., in Advanced but not Basic combat.

Think!

Obviously, a realistic approach favors skullduggery, planning, etc.  I don't think this needs mechanics, per se, but it's worth mentioning.

Bluff & Blind

There should be some element of bluff & blindness; fighters can fake weakness, and there's always an element of the unknown (is he bluffing or vulnerable?).


I'd like stances to be incorporated somehow.  The actual stances would be nice, but more abstract would be okay, too.

I'm thinking whatever stat I use for reflexes could determine initiative, without any random role added.  Any downsides to this?

Stuff I have to incorporate, i.e., factors:

Weapon reach/length
Damage Type (Cutting (Slashing, Chopping), Piercing (Thrusting, Stabbing), Bludgeon)
Room (space required to wield effectively; a better word than "room" is welcome)
Penetration
Weight
Balance

Attack type (thrust, slash, haymaker, murder stroke (pommel), etc.)
Attack Location (called shots)
Counterattack
Parry
Dodge
Riposte
Feint
(other fencing-type stuff I know nothing about; suggestions welcome)
Style (Sword & Shield, Sword & Buckler, Longsword Fencing, Etc.)

Damage
Fatigue
Fumbles (forced  (sweat in eyes or on weapon handle, slippery floor, etc.) or unforced (clumsiness, morale failure, etc.))

Okay, here's the first idea that popped into my head.  Use a bell curve roll (3d6 or 3d10), add modifiers, subtract defender's modified bell curve roll, result is the degree of success.  If negative, defender has seized initiative for next round (can add it to initiative, or to attack roll, or something - heh).  If positive, attacker has successfully hit defender - value is added to damage number for weapon, modifiers, then armor value is subtracted.  Degree of success might carry over to next round, somehow.

Any big stumbling blocks involved with something like this?  Doesn't seem terribly innovative so I'm sure there's some preexisting thinking from which I can benefit.

As for the cat-and-mouse thing, I was thinking that it could be pretty similar to the mechanic above, except benefits are transitory so Carpe Diem is encouraged.  E.g., combatants determine initiative, make "attack" and "defense" rolls, degree of success is added to attacker's strike next round, or lost if no attack is made.

Sorry this is all so vague, I've just started actually working on this, rather than thinking about working on it as I've been doing for a long time.  All help is greatly appreciated.

[Marshall Burns]

This is remarkably similar to one of my old combat systems.  Well, that's not that remarkable, really, as "realism" (by which I also meant gritty and hard-hitting) was my goal with it as well, and so was making combat rare by making it high-risk.

Now, I should probably mention that there's a reason it's one of my old combat systems.  In practice, it became very, very dry and tactical, quite a lot like a chess match.  This was bad because it wasn't gritty and hard-hitting (we were buffered against the violence by several layers of tactics), and also because combat became kindof divorced from what was going on at the moment (that is, when combat happened, we shifted gears from "stuff happening with the characters" to "tactical combat" mode).  How weird that, the more detailed and layered I made the system, the more abstracted our relationship, as players, to the violence and mise-en-scene was.  (Edgar Allan Poe once made an astounding point about how checkers requires more analytical prowess than chess, and that it's easy to mistake the complex for the profound.  I think he made this point somewhere in the "Purloined Letter" if my memory serves)

I realized that what I wanted was a system that would deliver the Violence and the Grittiness of a highly "realistic" combat system, with all the detailed injuries and blood loss and shock and damage to armor and weapons, reliably.  Most of the time, the highly detailed modeling got there eventually, but sometimes it went on for too long before anything 'happened," and up until that point it was a bland, flavorless tactical exercise.  I realized that I wanted to skip past all that ARMA and Shadowrun stuff and get straight to the arterial spray, compound fractures, and loss of life and limb, so all that could feed back directly into "what's happening," instead of a bunch of sound-and-fury rolls and chart look-ups that required several repeat cycles to get to the result that I wanted and expected. 

See, for some reason, I thought that "what I wanted to happen" had to be justified by a rational, realistic modeling process, with lots of dice and charts. It hadn't occurred to me that I could make the system such that it reliably generated the expected results without a bunch of unnecessary steps (ever had to ignore a roll's result because it "messed up" what was going on?  In such cases, the system has kicked something at us that doesn't conform to our genre expectations, our expectations of what's supposed to happen in-game.  For my money, a system that does that is a BAD SYSTEM).  So I cooked up a system where the terrible violence expected nearly always happens, with rules that focus only on that happening, not bothering to model things that ultimately don't make a big deal by themselves (oh, there was so much data that I was able to cull without feeling bad about it).

I'm not saying that's what you're doing; I'm just suggesting that you think about it.

Now, other than that, I have to ask if adding modifiers to a bell curve is a good idea.  Wouldn't that tend to result in awfully binary results?  I mean, the dice will tend to come up near the median, and then it wouldn't take too much of a positive or negative modifier to knock it into the extreme ranges, so you'd have to make the modifiers very small, but then that seems like a lot of fuss about nothing much.
Unless maybe the modifiers are based on proportion, instead of being additive?

-Marshall

[dindenver]

Hi!
  OK, I think you do need to explain what you mean by realism. But, here are things I have seen in tactical games that are not realistic:
1) HP - I know its supposed to be an abstraction, etc. blah blah, its unrealistic. I recommend a DMG track
2) AC makes you harder to hit - This seems counter intuitive to me. In reality if you wear heavy armor, you will move slower and be easier to hit, but it is likely that such a hit will not be as life threatening...
3) Multiple rounds of combat - The reality is any weapon (including the lowly dagger) is dangerous enough to take you out of a fight. Pretty much the first guy who lands a solid blow wins, right?
4) Death Spirals - Death Spirals are realistic. They may not be fun, but them's the breaks.
5) Separate hit and damage rolls - Rolling a critical hit and then doing 2 points of damage both sucks and blows. Its not realistic that you hit them in a spectacular way in a critical location, and then somehow didn't do any meaningful damage.
6) Knocking people out - Its easier to knock someone out then kill them. And once they are down, you can kill them at your leisure if you are that bloodthirsty. Any game that makes it harder to knock someone out than it is to kill them is unrealistic
7) Wrestling - Why is wrestling so hard in these games. And why is it usually the worst choice? If a guy has a sword or knife, its better to be grappling him than to be 3 feet away. I mean it is even better to be outside of running/attack distance, but if your choices are 3 feet or grappling, you know what you would do...
Bleeding - Many times blood loss will kill you long before pierced intestine will. Now that's realistic.
9) Infection - I get an infection every time I get out of surgery. Something tells me a barbarians sword is less clean...
  Well, you get the idea. I think you should play 5 or 10 rounds of practice with the math you prefer and see if its really fun. Run the numbers a little, then do a one-on-one combat with someone whose opinion you trust. See if it is fun. I started with a more realistic combat and the fights were over too fast. SO, I decided to dial it down...
  You might like it, not saying you won't. Just definitely run the numbers and then play straight battles (nothing else, no RP) at least like 5 or 10 of them. And listen to what people are saying when they critique them, don't argue away their view point, k?

[JQP]

I'm not saying that's what you're doing; I'm just suggesting that you think about it.

No, I think I know what you mean and I gave that a bit of thought before I posted.  You just articulated what I meant better than I did.  I wouldn't mind a different level of abstraction at all.  But, I want "realism" in the sense that: armor does what it's supposed to - not cinematically, but realistically; combat works the way it's supposed to - take a good chop to the leg and you're down, and very unlikely to get up short of mercy; etc.

I could care less HOW all that gets done, as long as it allows for my desired level of granularity (riposte, disarm, called shots, detailed critical hits (I'm sorta leaning toward the idea of most hits being critical), stances, etc.

If it's a bunch of flowcharts I'm happy, as long as it works and allows for tactics, maneuvers, realistic damage, realistic armor, bluff, uncertainty, etc.

I want a realistic balance, and enough detail for "duels" to feel deep.

(I plan to keep the WFRP fate points or something similar, so players have a bit of wriggle room, and I'll probably include something like TRoS' SAs at least as an option)

1) HP - I know its supposed to be an abstraction, etc. blah blah, its unrealistic. I recommend a DMG track

Yeah I haven't given much thought to how it'll work, but I'm thinking a series of critical tables should be in there somewhere.  To keep them fresh I was thinking of maybe doing a huge number of tables that GMs can swap in and out, or maybe even some kind of simple software that could mix and match stuff (e.g., throw a severed artery + a particular muscle torn, bla bla).

Hit points definitely aren't blowing my skirt up.  A wound is a wound, and each one is unique.

2) AC makes you harder to hit - This seems counter intuitive to me. In reality if you wear heavy armor, you will move slower and be easier to hit, but it is likely that such a hit will not be as life threatening...

Yeah, armor will include movement penalties, fatigue penalties, and will absorb/prevent damage.

3) Multiple rounds of combat - The reality is any weapon (including the lowly dagger) is dangerous enough to take you out of a fight. Pretty much the first guy who lands a solid blow wins, right?

Agreed, sans armor.

4) Death Spirals - Death Spirals are realistic. They may not be fun, but them's the breaks.

Death spiral?  You mean cumulative penalties based on getting your ass kicked?

5) Separate hit and damage rolls - Rolling a critical hit and then doing 2 points of damage both sucks and blows. Its not realistic that you hit them in a spectacular way in a critical location, and then somehow didn't do any meaningful damage.

Right now I'm thinking that degree of success for an attack carries over into determining damage, and there'll be no damage roll; you know, the degree of success is the random part of the damage determination, then you add in STR modifiers, weapon damage factor, etc.

6) Knocking people out - Its easier to knock someone out then kill them. And once they are down, you can kill them at your leisure if you are that bloodthirsty. Any game that makes it harder to knock someone out than it is to kill them is unrealistic

I don't know if I agree with that.  I sorta see knocking someone out and killing someone as just different positions on the same continuum; e.g., bludgeon someone hard enough and you knock him out - bludgeon him a little harder and you kill him.  But, I'm thinking top of the skull stuff here, I guess you're right that stuns are a big part of fighting.  They happen all the time in boxing...

7) Wrestling - Why is wrestling so hard in these games. And why is it usually the worst choice? If a guy has a sword or knife, its better to be grappling him than to be 3 feet away. I mean it is even better to be outside of running/attack distance, but if your choices are 3 feet or grappling, you know what you would do...

Yeah I totally plan on having grappling in there.  How better to work your dagger in between defenses?

Bleeding - Many times blood loss will kill you long before pierced intestine will. Now that's realistic.

Yeah.  In a D&D type game bleeding's a drag, but in a game where combat is nasty, brutish, and short, bleeding/fatigue/detailed crits aren't as big a problem.

9) Infection - I get an infection every time I get out of surgery. Something tells me a barbarians sword is less clean...

Yeah this is a fairly easy one to do, so I think it's a no-brainer to include it.

And listen to what people are saying when they critique them, don't argue away their view point, k?

Totally.  I'm just kicking an idea around, I'm not attached to it at all at this point.

[JQP]

Now, other than that, I have to ask if adding modifiers to a bell curve is a good idea.  Wouldn't that tend to result in awfully binary results?  I mean, the dice will tend to come up near the median, and then it wouldn't take too much of a positive or negative modifier to knock it into the extreme ranges, so you'd have to make the modifiers very small, but then that seems like a lot of fuss about nothing much.
Unless maybe the modifiers are based on proportion, instead of being additive?

Yeah, I thought about that.  The more granularity you have with this mechanic, the more you need modifiers.  And the more modifiers you have, the more you skew the bell curve.  That's why I was thinking of 3d10.  Maybe I should be thinking software here.  I know PnPers love their dice, but it might get absurd adding up the numbers needed for a robust enough bell curve.

But I really like bell curves for this kind of stuff, because they make things less random, which makes skill that much more important.

[JQP]

Anyone know of a freely available skills web I could use?  One of those things that shows skill overlap (train in longbow and become naturally more proficient with the short bow, train in tracking and get a boost to hunting, etc.)?

More generally, it'd be nice to see a thoughtful breakdown of 14-15th century skills since I doubt I'll be needing to come up with anything revolutionary or reinvent the wheel.

[David Berg]

David Artman came up with a targeting grid in a First Thoughts thread a few months ago that you might wanna check out.  I can't rmember the title, though.  If a search doesn't turn it up, you could PM him.

Your armor types sound good to me (though I know nothing about lamellar), except that there's no historical record of coeur boulli being used for armor (at least not that I can find on the internet).  SCA folks can vouch for the fact that the stuff works, and it seems the means were available back then -- so hard leather armor could have been worn.  Was it?  My best guess is no.  Maybe everyone who could have afforded it could also afford mail?  I dunno.

Here's my game's armor table:

Armor	penalty	Dice	Difficulty
			Edged	Weight	Pierce	XBow
Soft Leather	none	1	4+	5+	4+	6+
Padded	none	1	3+	5+	4+	6+
Mail	-1 agility	3	4+	5+	4+	6+
Legionnaire	-1 agility	3	4+	5+	4+	5+
Plate	-2 agility	4	2+	5+	2+	4+

I want a free skill web too!  Someone hook us up!

[Hereward The Wake]

There was a report on coeur bouilli in a Royal Armouries Year book and a chap making a helm out of it.
Personally it would be easier to get than mail, but less likely to survive.
I'll see if I can find the report.

JW

[Hereward The Wake]

Thom Richardson, Royal Armouries keeper of Armour, quotes that many inventories of the late 13th and earlt 14thcenturiesw list its use and that a mid 14th century upper arm defence survives in the British museum. There is also a surviving piece of CB horse armour in the Royal Armouries itself.
JW

[JQP]

David Artman came up with a targeting grid in a First Thoughts thread a few months ago that you might wanna check out.  I can't rmember the title, though.  If a search doesn't turn it up, you could PM him.

I'll check it out.  I haven't even thought about the targeting part, except for the assumption that all shots are called shots.  Seems easy enough IRL to target one area and accidentally hit another for damage, but nothing's coming to me for how to do that in mechanics.

Here's my game's armor table:

Nice, thanks.

Thom Richardson, Royal Armouries keeper of Armour, quotes that many inventories of the late 13th and earlt 14thcenturiesw list its use and that a mid 14th century upper arm defence survives in the British museum. There is also a surviving piece of CB horse armour in the Royal Armouries itself.
JW

Yeah it seems like it'd be a common form of poor man's defense, and a scarce find for archaeologists what with it rotting and all.

[dindenver]

Jay,
  I think that the gaff to creating a realistic system that is playable is to combine as much related information as possible. A good example of this is how handling is managed in Car Wars. Its a very simple mechanic, but when you play, you really feel like their is a physics engine behind it, but it is not hard to use and no one has ever made a computer program for it...
  The reality is, there is not a lot of moving parts to track when it comes to incapacitating someone in a fight. Pretty much, the factors are: blood loss, pain, mortal wounds, right?
  So maybe Blood loss has a time to live stat. and you just use the lowest time to live of all the blood loss wounds you have...
  And pain and mortal wounds (stab to heart, etc) can use a damage track ala CP2020 or Exalted. Then every weapon just has to have a damage stat and a blood loss stat.
  I don't think there is much advantage to keeping track of stats on such a skale that there is a meaningful difference between a 36" blade and a 38" blade or between a 8 pound sword and a 9 pound sword, do you?
  You almost have to look at it as a cost benefit analysis. How much effort will it be for the player to track that and how much extra fun is generated by the extra work?
  RPGs are a social experience, I think adding a computer play aid will detract from that, as there will be more time spent with that aid then there will be time spent with the other players, no?
  And if you want to see a medium crunch system, check mine out...
  Just my two cents, good luck man.

[JQP]

Dave,

You make excellent points.  I think you've got the priorities right; fun is always top priority.  On the other hand, I'd like to have enough granularity available so that if player wants the detail (his idea of fun), it'll be there.  The thing I keep thinking about realism is, "why did they do that"?  E.g., a great example is the armor thing; at some point it became "the thing to do" to suit up in plate, drop the shield, and use both hands for weapons.  They obviously had good reason.  I want to set the rules up so that this choice makes sense.  Not so much to track every inch of a blade as another point on a reach stat, just to make reality reflected in the mechanics.  Obviously there's a bridge too far somewhere, but I want to get the broad strokes.  So players will be rewarded for saving up for plate and a good sword, rather than running around in an arming jacket with a dagger.

I think a lot of complexity can be handled before combat even begins, leaving players to just track a few conditional modifiers, fatigue, bleeding, etc., so they spend more time during character creation, and checking the numbers before a session, and less time fumbling about in combat.

And I'm thinking about the software just in terms of dice rolling (and maybe crit tables), which is a time-saver not a time-consumer if we're talking about expanding bell curves (e.g., 3d20 can take a while to add up, but only takes a moment with something like DiceLab).  But I'd never make it opaque, or required - if players insist on rolling the dice and doing the math, who am I to argue?

[JQP]

I was also thinking yesterday about incorporating some version of a "take 10," where GMs can use an average number instead of rolling and use it for mooks, melees and whatnot.

[David Berg]

In terms of "fun vs granularity" trade-offs, this thread about my combat system might provide some good food for thought.

[dindenver]

Jay,
  The issue with Take 10 is this: It was designed to take a mechanic that can be tedious (re-rolling a skill check on something that is not critical if it fails) and uses it in a way that it is not intended.
  From what you have said, the number rolled is going to be critical, and if you Take 10, then you allow the damage to be totally predictable and/or preventable.
  So, what will happen is for guards that are a moderate threat Take 10 will get used (and the DMG will be totally predictable), and if it is not strong a threat, Take 10 will never be used (because they have no chance to hit unless its a lucky roll).

  I think we are touching on a key point and I want to draw a little more attention to it. You want to make a "good mechanic" and I agree with your aims. But, you are already considering die roller software for the GM and another mechanic to make it easier to handle more combatants (even though they are weak).
  This tells me that, even in your own mind, your mechanic is too complex. Don't get me wrong, I have made the same mistake myself, I am not accusing you of doing anything I haven't done. But, I am saying that maybe a certain level of abstraction and/or rigidity might help you enforce the things that are important to you.
  Look at it this way, why don't all RP'ers play freeform RPGs. I mean if they did they can play anything they want, right? The reality is that some rigidity helps enforce genre continuity, spark creativity and get players to agree on the focus/style of play. For instance, you can't use ditv to do a dungeon crawl. But most people would say ditv is a good game.
  So, my advice is to look at the stuff that happens in combat and do two things:
1) If it is not fun or not important it, bundle it into an mechanic that is fun/important.
2) If it there is overlap between two elements, then combine them. In other words, if two weapon stats or mechanical elements fulfill the same basic elemental function, then they should be combined.
  Examples of things that might be combined: Piercing and bleeding might be the same mechanics/stats. Initiative, Reach and Speed might be the same stat/mechanic. See what I mean?
  Good luck man!