It shouldn\u2019t surprise you that I\u2019ve got some ideas. I\u2019ll talk about them in more detail next time.<\/p>\n
As I mentioned at the end of last week\u2019s blog, now that I\u2019ve got the character sheet all figured out (again), the other big part of the Cinemechanix rules that aren\u2019t really working for me are the combat rules. It\u2019s not that they\u2019re broken, it\u2019s just they work like most RPG combat rules, which is to say that they\u2019re not especially cinematic. Players and NPCs hit each other with pointy sticks or bullets or whatever until one of them takes enough damage to die. Whether it\u2019s interesting or not is entirely in the hands of the players and the GM. If you want to do a cool trick, you\u2019ve usually got to use special rules that are hard to remember. Also, while fancy stunts can often be fun to describe and liven up combat, their effects are often less geared towards eliminating the bad guy than just hitting him with a stick. Since getting rid of the bad guy is usually the main goal in RPG combat, players tend to choose good old-fashioned and reliable stick hitting over less effective and more complicated combat stunts. And since there are only so many ways to describe hitting someone with your stick, combat gets repetitive fast.<\/p>\n
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One problem with RPG combat is my old foe, abstraction vs. detail. On the outer edge of the abstraction end of the spectrum, the die rolls simply describe the ebb and flow of combat. The die rolls don\u2019t have any real correlation to details of the fight beyond what the players and GM describe. You won. How did you win? You lost. Here\u2019s how you lost. While this gives players free reign over what happens during the combat scene and can work well with players who are good at improvising and working together to keep everything making sense, the gap between the die rolls and the descriptions can make the rules seem meaningless. It\u2019s kind of like a video game where you randomly mash the buttons and occasionally your guy does something cool but you have no idea why. You\u2019re not really making any decisions that affect the outcome, regardless of how much control you take over describing the roll.<\/p>\n
On the detail end of things, more correlation between the die rolls and the on-screen action requires more complicated game rules. Only instead of having to learn which combination of buttons to push to do a backflip, you\u2019ve got to learn a rule new and probably do more complex math than you\u2019d have to do if you just hit him with your stick. On the extreme end of the detail side of the spectrum, you get into facing rules and femoral artery integrity checks that tend to bring the story to a grinding halt while the GM tries to remember how to use a scientific calculator.<\/p>\n
Another problem with RPG combat it\u2019s usually about attrition: You win the battle by hitting the other guy until he runs out of hit points or wound levels or vigor or whatever a particular game calls it. Games that try to present an alternatives usually fall into two camps. The first consists of\u00a0 (often highly random) instant kill options that work great for NPCs but are too deadly for PCs unless you\u2019re playing a game like Paranoia where frequent character death doesn\u2019t kill the continuity of the story. The other option is a more story game type system where the characters are more or less immortal but losing a battle has other consequences to the story. I have two major complaints about this kind of system: (1) At this level of abstraction, you might as well just save time on combat rolls and resolve the battle with a single die roll; (2) Since losing a battle should always have consequences (otherwise there\u2019s no reason to include the battle), making consequences the cost of losing doesn\u2019t really accomplish anything. It makes it feel like there are no stakes to the fight scene. It\u2019s kind of a like a Die Hard movie where Bruce Willis never bleeds and his shirt stays clean.<\/p>\n
So, I\u2019ve got (at least) three starting goals for trying to revamp combat:<\/p>\n
It shouldn\u2019t surprise you that I\u2019ve got some ideas. I\u2019ll talk about them in more detail next time.<\/p>\n
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