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.