A New Look at Combat (Part 1): Reexamining the Fundamentals

Conflict is an essential element of any story, and the most primal form of conflict is physical violence.  Understandably, combat forms a large part of role-playing games, and has developed a number of standard practices which make running combat easier.  Unfortunately, these conventions also encourage changing the player’s perspective from that of a character’s personal role in the conflict to a bird’s eye view of an elaborate game of resource management.  The goal of this series of posts is to allow players to make choices in combat that parallel the choices of their characters.  This leads to combat that is more engaging, personal, and immediate than which enemy is most tactically advantageous to attack.

Traditionally, an RPG combat system is built on the foundation of time being divided into rounds, in which each character gets one or more actions in an order determined by initiative.  These structures were developed for ease of play; everyone gets a turn in a defined order, and every time the process repeats, a predefined amount of time elapses.  To illustrate how ill-suited this system is to modeling interaction between people, imagine using this system in social situations; a round of social interaction lasts five minutes, during which you have one action to influence or gain information from a person, and we go in order of who rolls best.  If this sort of thing appeals to you, you can find ‘social combat’ in Exalted or the Song of Ice and Fire RPG.  Unfortunately, fighting (or any other personal interaction) doesn’t happen at a steady pace with each participant waiting so that everyone gets a turn.  Combat goes in fits and starts of action, no one holds still to let you maneuver around the battlefield, and participants don’t always have the correct positioning or desire to attack the enemy.

The root of the problem is rounds and actions.  A particular unit of time is used to contain each discrete set of actions that characters can perform.  There is a presumption that all actions in combat will take roughly the same amount of time.  As a result, categories of actions are created to make things slightly less ridiculous (major actions, minor actions, standard actions, etc.).  Then some actions are so trivial with respect to their influence on combat that they are deemed to not take any time at all.  One way to overcome this problem is found in Exalted and Scion.  Instead of rounds, they have a Battle Wheel that is divided into a number of pie-piece-shaped sections known as ‘ticks.’  Every action has a speed of a number of ticks, and their representation on the Battle Wheel is advanced that many ticks, to come up later in the initiative order.  Thus, a character who regularly takes quicker actions can perform more than someone who takes slower actions.

While this is a clever solution, it doesn’t address the biggest problem fundamental to RPG combat: discrete actions.  This is a staple of war gaming and board games in general; when it’s your turn, the rest of the world holds still and allows you to complete your action.  The most egregious offender in this area is movement.  Each character can move a certain distance on his turn, presumably based on average movement rates.  If a round lasts six seconds, an average person can run about 40 meters in that time.  A relay race with four average people, each running 40 meters, would take about 24 seconds.  Trying to model that movement with the standard combat system would only take one round, or six seconds.  If the initiative works out right, or everyone ‘delays their action’ until the baton reaches them, then racer #1 takes his movement for the round, followed by racer #2, etc.  In the situation where one character wants to prevent a fight by keeping himself between the two combatants, this is impossible if the actions are discrete.  Wherever the peace-keeper positions himself, one or both combatants can simply walk around.

The use of miniatures and square or hex grids makes things worse by allowing players to imagine combatants confined to their 1-2 meter boxes and planning their route.  Imagine trying to tactically assess and plan your route through a mass of people all fighting and moving at the same time.  When ranged weapons are involved, things are even more artificial.  In the cases where a game is actually interested in what is in front, near, or behind the intended target, it’s during that particular turn, when other combatants may have ‘already acted’ or not yet been able to, including movement.  By winning initiative, a character can sprint the entirety of their ability before any other character can do anything.  This allows them to escape enemy fire, or allow them to run directly through or in the middle of an ongoing or eminent firefight due to initiative and discrete actions.

When the routine decisions that players make in combat have to do with managing resources, whether they’re hit points, fatigue levels, power points, choice of limited-use powers, etc., this takes the player’s focus away from the concerns of the character.  Rather than the combat being a part of the story, it becomes a mini-game of maintaining point levels.  In order for combat to have a seamless flow with the story, the player needs to keep their perspective and decision-making with the character.  Think about the way combat is described in stories; authors don’t discuss rounds, initiative, health levels, and focus on the character agonizing over whether to use his powerful attack that he can only use once or save it for another fight that day.  Combat is described in terms of how each combatant tries to achieve the goal of overcoming the other.  These are the decisions that a combat system should require players and Game Masters to make.

A New Look at Combat (index)