Natural Hazards: Quicksand

An innocent person missteps and starts sinking in quicksand.  The hero has to hurry otherwise the person is going to drown!  Or, not so much.  We have seen this in the movies hundreds of times, but quicksand isn’t a drowning hazard.  It’s more of a starving or loosing all our supplies kind of hazard.  Quicksand is still good for adding drama and challenges in games, even without the drowning.

A New Look at Combat (Part 8): Beyond Damage

Continuing from the last post (Building a Combat System From the Ground Up), the next step after establishing control of range is determining the result of offense and defense. Because there are already many methods there to handle this, I won’t waste time trying to convince anyone that what I like is best; just use your favorite. The only important piece is that the degree of success has some influence on the magnitude of the effect – having only pass/fail results diminishes the importance of everything before the roll and encourages all-or-nothing decisions. Instead, I’m going discuss the idea that putting out damage shouldn’t be the only viable goal in combat.

A New Look at Combat (Part 3): Considerations of Range and Movement

The concept of ‘turns’ in combat allows for actions to be taken while everyone else stands still; when this is removed, the ideas of range and movement need to be reconsidered.  Range, the distance between combatants, can’t be expressed in precise distances; ranges are dynamic, changing with the movement of the combatants.  What becomes important, then, is the relative range that each combatant is trying to maintain.  If one wants to be at a closer range than the other, then there may be a lot of movement as the former attempts to close while the latter tries to back up or circle to keep the other one away.

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.