good morning! it's been a long while away from blogging. life has been chaotic which means my capacity for organizing games has been low, while my desire to think about them and distract myself with OSR blogs has been stratospheric yet again. today I'm here to talk about rules for combat in RPGs.
I've been toiling at my very own curated/remixed～scifi/fantasy/horror heartbreaker～ game-playing toolbox suite [[>>codename: red sun minima {WIP}<<]] for so long now that this is happening to me. it's time to do a bit of exegesis. reader, be my leeches.
what's red sun minima?
The YEAR is 3V56. It is the NADIR before the GREEN DAWN.
The GUTTER is neo-AERTH's final CITY, mile-high landfill of a hundred suns.
A green heaven, ZHJEEN, sits imprisoned overhead.
From ZHJEEN'S NEEDLE drips a vital NECTAR. Where it spills, new life blooms.
Sometimes a drip slips through the cracks.
it's the successor to my last campaign, a collection of rules I have stolen from other game designers--mostly Ava Islam's work in Errant, John Harper's Blades, the Last Gasp Grimoire guy, Troika, Gus L, Maze Rats, techNoir, Mindstorm Press, UVG and Prismatic Wasteland, Apocalypse World, CY_BORG, Skerples and the larger GLOGosphere--and tinkered with obsessively out of a desire to get them all to play nice together for the purpose of running and playing interesting adventure games set in the Year 3V56.
it's like a big nasty binder with all of my favorite junk inside, more hack than game but ideally enough to run a decent campaign off of all in one place. it's got scaffolding for running satisfying sewer-crawl experiences, city intrigue and missions, faction play, downtime, wasting-CASH-for-XP advancement, and a load of character options harvested from across the boughs of the GLOGosphere.
why did I do this to myself?
mostly because I wanted to run a game like this using only 2d6. I hate the d20, the d10. The d12? get the heck out of here. I literally can't tell the difference between a d12 and a d10 half the time. throwing a d20 makes me feel like a sweaty gamer (pejorative). throwing 2d6 makes me feel like a smooth and brilliant gambler genius playing a sophisticated parlor game. the riot of shapes offends my delicate sensibilities. why do d4s even look like that?
sorry this is probably my PbtA socialization talking. I mean no actual disrespect to gamers or designers with different polyhedral preferences. of course these are all different tools in the toolbox, and if I spent some more time playing d20 games, would I get over myself? probably. but there's something about Subjective Game Feel that's different than shapes and numbers and flat distribution curves that's hard to pin down but I'm trying to get at today. call it the poetics of dice-gaming, the way that the sum of what's evoked at the table by this odd little multi-sensory imaginal-fascination hobby can never be reduced back down to the machinery that spun it up. there's a different sort of energy that lurks in the machine of the humble role-playing game.
lately I've really enjoyed playing games analog style, at my kitchen table, with everything everyone needs to play printed out and scattered all over the place, getting up and pacing around while players mull over decisions, maps getting drawn on graph paper ripped out of notebooks and passed around and lost. I like to do a lot of monster foley and sound effects. during a session recently the players rolled a random encounter while camping in a haunted desert during the witching hour and began to hear the sound of a few dozen pickaxes striking stone in eerie unison from down in a gulch below them and on instinct I started tapping my fingernails on an empty water glass in rhythm for the duration of the encounter. when a player spoke out to the source of the sound, it paused for a beat, and started again. they tried to call out again and heard a raspy voice shout, "THEY DON'T LIKE TO BE INTERRUPTED," and the sound halted. the players were so unnerved they broke camp and loaded up their steeds immediately. they made a point of going the long way around that area every time they went from town to the dungeon.
it was a small part of the session, maybe 15 minutes, but it was a proud moment for me as someone out of the habit of running games lately, and it reminded me of what I love about the hobby: curating and embodying a strange and deeply specific vibe that feeds on the creativity and curiosity of my players and forms a disgusting and beautiful feedback-loop symbiosis of horror and wonder in their imaginations. desire and struggle. that's money. that's the good stuff.
I think in the neo/neu/nu-/post-/OSR scene there's a school of thought that emphasizes pruning back the machinery of the game to make space for all of the atmosphere and roleplay and setting and embodiment to take center stage, right. I think that's often what it succeeds at. I think the pursuit of perfectly smooth lubricated mechanical dungeon-game elegance can also be wielded fascistically, though, seeking to excise what's seen as the "excess" while the un-interrogated "default" object of play is the only thing that remains, when the "excess" is often a rich subsumed semi-libidinal space where people can find sticky points of interest that allow their imagination to find purchase and they can begin to project parts of themselves, to develop the sense of embodiment of their character that's necessary for all of that atmosphere and horror and wonder to really hit.
You follow me? This is part of what I love about Errant. It's baroque in the greatest of ways, a strange and specific vision of a dungeon-game. Each mechanism in its gearbox thrums with the desperation, irony, and decadence thematic to its take on "OSR" games. Tom Bloom's work also comes to mind, his work lives and dies on style. If you're still with me add me on Discord so we can play Maleghast.
I read some people reject some of this sticky feelings/aspiration-projection-onto-character stuff as oppositional to exploration-based games where character death is on the table as a consequence. It's maligned as a 5e-ism or just "not the place" for it. I think that's another false dichotomy. Is the smooth platonic ideal of gaming that we are all randomly generated morally-ambiguous dungeon-delvers that are nothing more than the next one off the assembly line, whom we dare not form affection for, so we play in a perpetual state of disaffected detachment through their milestones of kill, burn, get treasure, level up, reproducing the state of dissociation that is coincidentally the mechanism which enables the colonizer to enact conquest? I find I can enjoy that style for its gaminess as much as the next gal, especially if the world and dungeon are well-designed, but it often leaves something to be desired for me, and most of the time that I'm running games for other women, that's just not where most of the energy ends up at the table, no matter how mud-and-blood the system is. We're projecting our hopes onto these little drama-daemons precisely because we know the odds are against them. We're agonizing over guiding them through moral dilemmas and complex choices. We're instantly developing weird attachments to cruel, antagonistic, and just plain freaky NPCs. We cheer our character's successes while knowing they are not safe, that they will suffer and die, like we will ourselves, because that's part of the contract of the game. We open ourselves to grief and excess, to joy and disgust, to tedium and novelty, because that is what it is to live, which is to play.
I would argue that the seasoned AD&D diehard is doing the same thing every time he rolls 3d6 down the line, because it's a mold that allows him that outlet without threatening his masculinity, but because his fantasy is often primarily one of acquisition and conquest, which is the baseline assumption of the hobby, we don't question it. Again: I can enjoy a good conquest as much as the next gal. But my biggest priority as a designer is that when you engage with my rules, I want you to feel something. The shared experience of that feeling is what gives a campaign a life of its own.
I'm shadowboxing here. I'm yelling at a guy in my head. I'm maybe also carving a niche for myself here. I am never going to write games with the economy of language of Chris McDowall. Many of us are worshipping at the altar of Chris McDowall and flagellating ourselves for failing to reproduce his standard. His work is so clean, it's no wonder it's everywhere. He's dedicated to his craft and it shows. I'm excited to read his next game, but I don't think we don't need any more Chris McDowalls. We need more mess, and vision, and idiosyncrasy, and excess in adventure-gaming, like this brilliant intervention in McDowall's latest knight game, which centers drama and heart.
What do I want the mechanics around violence to do in my ostensibly OSR-styled game? It's a bit of a screed. Buckle up.
on violence
Imaginary violence is one of the primary sites where subsumed libidinal energy is projected. Violence and the erotic are inseparable. If that's a challenging claim to you, go watch literally any movie, like Alien, or Crimes of the Future, or, like, Camp Miasma. This doesn't exclude elfgames. In writing the rules in this post I stole a lot from
Last Gasp Grimoire's house rules and I had left the tab open on the section concerning HP, which is literally titled I'd Hit That. As insurrectionist gamers, do we simply wash our hands of what we may see as a stark example of casual Lamentations-era misogyny that festered in the halcyon days of the G+ era and resign ourselves to the smoothness of McDowallian auto-hit as the only sanitary path forward? Or do we acknowledge the messy richness of the field of violence as a place of character expression, allow ourselves to give in and be seduced by that lurid phantasm, the 'build,' the 'fighting style,' itself the libidinal fantasy at the heart of the Souls games, whose range of options for juicy tactile realization is so central to the formula that has made them so wildly successful? Read some more Last Gasp material, like his tables of
gristly wounds, or, better yet, this one of
infections and diseases. Over the top? Certainly. Overly complex mechanically? To some, absolutely. Would I want to include the result for shitting yourself to death at my table? Probably not. But I have to respect that his prose absolutely drips off the page, oozes style, all in service of creating that spine-tingling feeling of embodiment.
It's like sex scenes in fiction. The way someone makes love reveals a lot about them. Most games aren't interested in exploring that. What might the way someone approaches violence reveal instead?
 |
And I began to wonder... "hit points"... "hitting on"... "hitting it"...
could it be that what we want from games, is the same as what we want from love? |
Basically: I've played a bunch of Into the Odd-derived games. For the uninitiated, the primary intervention over D&D-style combat is the 'auto-hit' system. Instead of rolling to-hit, tallying bonuses, checking against the opponent's Armor Class, and then rolling damage if it hits, all attacks just roll damage, Armor provides a flat reduction, and the way HP works is tweaked slightly. The main benefit, the argument goes, is that it speeds up combat substantially; rounds are no longer "wasted" due to guys whiffing against each other over and over.
At times I've been seduced by the logic of it, in no small part due to reading its justifications over and over in the profusion of games in its lineage. It doesn't seem that much faster than B/X after the ~10 minute learning curve, in my albeit limited experience, but there's definitely an elegance to it, less dice to roll and less to track for players and DMs. I've tried to make it work in my games.
But it turns out?
i miss missing!
I miss missing! I'm planting my flag: I just think it rocks when attacks miss. That feeling of, "shit, I have d6 HP, if that guy hits me, I'm probably just fucking dead, let's pray to God," I think that fucking ROCKS.
ITO games reinterpret HP as 'Hit Protection', which is representative of near-misses that reduce your ability to protect yourself from serious wounds, and once HP is depleted it detracts from your STR score, which is more akin to your meat points. My smooth logic brain can follow the reasoning there but my embodied projected-self loves the experience of a near-miss. Something different happens at the table if I'm not sure when I'm picking up the pencil to erase and rewrite my HP. It's unpredictable and produces a subjective feeling of vulnerability, of tension and smallness and the boundaries of my character's imaginal body, that I just don't get from auto-hit systems, which tend to feel floatier, to me, as they follow a more predictable countdown-like pace. Into the Odd's Armor system makes room for the plate-armored dreadknought to shrug off rolls of 3 or less, which is ultimately the same thing as a miss, but something about it feels inert to me. My brain knows that they're not really missing, it's just my armor that protected me.
I think what I'm getting at is also downstream of the inheritance of ARMOR CLASS, which is D&D's approximation of how hittable a character is, which is an amalgamation of physical armor and natural dodginess. I would argue that these are DIFFERENT THINGS that each produce a distinct game-feel and express distinct player fantasies in the far-flung future of 2026. Where's the space for the light-footed roguish character who wants to specialize in not-getting-hit, for the Soulslike "light load" dodge-machine sicko to make war with infuriating grace and finesse? It's the earliest of playground taunts: "you can't catch me!" I've read auto-hit likers describe missing as "frustrating." What if frustration is part of the fabric of experience that a game is made to evoke? What if that's the point?
If I'm playing a game where I'm sitting down to run a fight scene round by round in 2026, where players are making choices about their armor and weapons, adding up attack rolls, ticking off LIFE points, I need some real tension to keep me engaged. I think about a line from critic Dia Lacina often as it relates to game design: "
it's the friction that keeps me adhered." It's like the drama of the miss and the hit keeps the tempo of the whole affair. If I wanted something different, I would just say "okay, he hits you, you're feeling pretty bad now," like this
lightweight take on Troika does, or use something like TechNoir's adjective-based resolution system, or run
Jay Dragon's Almost, a perfect game exploring the complexity of the near-miss.
Especially in red sun minima's kitchen sink haunted scifi-fantasy milieu, mecha and mutants are juxtaposed with goblins, angels, ghosts, sentient plants, regular humes, and demons. I want fighting each to have a chance to feel different. I think the distinction between dodging and armor might be interesting enough--and the way each interfaces with other game systems, like encumbrance, classes, and resource management, distinct enough--to warrant some excessive mechanical bits, ideally without sacrificing much of the ease at the table you get from auto-hit combat or the room for adjudication and cunning exploits of tactical infinity that you can only get with plenty of negative space in your ruleset.
red sun exegesis
red sun minima has a few design conceits: every roll should be 2d6, sometimes plus a modifier; you always want to roll high; keep math after dice rolls to a minimum.
Originally I based its combat system off of Troika, another 2d6 game which is a lesson in an evocative take on adventure game design, and, paradoxically, was my introduction to tabletop RPGs. I still think its random initiative system is awesome. It plays so fast. Since red sun minima has character advancement, crits, and random health, I worry it might push an already-swingy game too far in the 'frustrating' direction, but honestly, I should test it out and see how it goes sometime.
Something I want to take from Troika is contested attack rolls. Every melee attack is an unpredictable engagement: initiating doesn't always mean you hit them. In Troika both sides roll and the higher side deals damage to the lower. What I like about that:
* wading into melee with anyone becomes a risk, instead of an I-go-you-go dance. this incentivizes players to fear melee and do everything they can to stack the deck before engaging, which both encourages players to engage with the fiction and is thematic for a lethal setting.
* it lets characters potentially make an infinite number of counter-attacks in a turn if they are skilled enough to dumpster everyone who challenges them. I have an image in my head associated with this of like, a samurai holding off a chokepoint against a horde of goblins and slaying each one as they whiff their approach. something about this is dynamic and awesome, to me. it's like
fighting a skilled Baiken in Xrd.
* it has weapon matrices, which I don't have the juice to reproduce for my game, but fall into the category of "beautiful weird little baroque game-feel artifacts" to me.
another big knock-on effect of 2d6 gaming is that anything that gives a +modifier to an attack roll becomes a big determinant of a character's ability to win a fight.
what I don't like: the outcome is pretty binary. need there always be a top and a bottom a winner and loser?
action rules in red sun minima
below are the rules as they stand.
for context, red sun minima has 5 essences: FLESH, SKILL, MIND, PSYCHE, ZEAL.
+modifiers range from -4 to +4.
banes and bonus dice are adv/disadv; roll another die, take the higher/lower two. they stack.
some rules also describe "notches." if any item is notched thrice, it's broken or used up.
FLOW of ACTION
when action breaks out, characters state what they want to do that round. the oracle judges their actions as quick or slow and resolves them in sequence. if there's a conflict, characters make an opposed SKILL check to see who goes first.
quick actions = firing a readied ranged weapon, slinging a prepared spell, engaging a target in melee range, using an item, moving a zone, etc.
slow actions = moving a zone and attacking, attacking with a colossal weapon, casting a spell from a grimoire, moving multiple zones, taking careful aim at a target and firing, etc. slow actions can be interrupted.
surprise round = one side can take a round of actions unopposed, initial attacks gain a bonus die.
ATTACKING
all melee attacks are exchanges. both sides roll 2d6+ATK, the higher roll strikes first. if you roll higher than your opponent's EVADE, it's a hit and deals damage = the result.
two ones: critical miss! notch your weapon.
two sixes: critical hit! 2x damage, bypassing armor.
+ATK: each level in a martial class gives you +1 ATK, up to +4.
two-handed weapons get +1 ATK. colossal weapons add an ESSENCE +mod to an +ATK and are always slow.
ranged exchanges = if you can't return fire, you're just praying not to get hit. cover imposes a bane on your opponent's roll.
sneak attacks, fictional positioning, weapon matchups, elemental affinities etc. grant bonus/bane dice.
EVADE
your EVADE score is equal to half of the number of item slots you have empty, rounded up.
EVADE cannot exceed 7.
unaware, incapacitated, or immobilized characters have 0 EVADE.
ARMOR
notch armor to change a die from an attack roll that would have hit you into a 1. also blocks knock-on effects like poison from a scorpion stinger, suffering mutation from a blast of face-melting goop, etc.
light and medium armor, shields, helmets = block the lower die.
heavy armor = block the higher die.
armor has 3 notches per slot it takes up. if all are notched = it's destroyed.
light armor = 1 slot = 3 notches.
medium armor = 2 slots = 6 notches.
heavy armor = 3 slots = 9 notches.
shield = 1 slot = 3 notches.
helmet = 1 slot = 3 notches.
LIFE
PCs start with 2 LIFE dice (2d6).
WOUNDS
if you would be brought below 0 LIFE, you must make a FLESH save or be knocked unconscious, and take a wound for every 6 points of damage taken in excess of 0 LIFE. each wound imposes a bane on a given type of check.
if you take three wounds, you are dying. a dying character will perish in one hour if not healed.
if you would take four or more wounds, you are immediately and messily slain. it would take someone 2d6 beats to collect all of the bits of you into a sack. resurrection costs 5x.
heal one wound for each week you spend on vacation.
when a wound heals, move it to your memory and gain a LIFE die. you can have up to 5 total LIFE dice.
commentary
ARMOR:
A reverse trip through reading
Red Ink Adventures in this game's early life as a Maze Rats hack (which it still, sort of, kind of is) brought me around to this post on
FKR Armor in opposed combat, which actually spit me back exactly where I began, with Errant's take on Black Hack's "armor points" thing, which is sort of a codification of the "shields must be splintered" classic house rule. In early days of the game I had "hats/helmets must be splintered" instead. I settled on a combination of the two, I like plate having a perk since most OSR games penalize its use so much. I like giving players an option to hit the "block" button in a game with high lethality.
I think the fantasy behind these rules is awesome and reminds me mecha fiction, or like, Berserk, where the "mass combat" scenes are all about gigantic metal guys wailing on each other until somebody's helmet breaks open, which is how you know it's getting serious. I made an effort to standardize it and slightly reduce bookkeeping--I think Errant's Quality rules are too much for me, and each inventory slot on the character sheet includes little "notch" boxes to fill in and erase, so hopefully that makes it easier on people.
In Errant, armor is asymmetric: PCs have blocks while NPCs just have more HP. in my game I'm going to try giving NPCs armor points to block hits like PCs for verisimilitude/setting reasons and see how it goes. I don't think it will be too much extra cognitive load for running/prepping encounters.
EVADE
There's 12 inventory slots. stark naked, you're rocking +6 EVADE. character creation tends to fill half of your slots, so +3 is more typical. some classes will get +1 EVADE as they level up.
I like the way skill influences your ability to hit an evasive character with the 2d6 distribution math, too. in the above "samurai chokepoint goblin massacre" fantasy, once the +6 ATK cyber-ronin mechagoblin takes point, it's a whole different ball game.
My biggest concern here is that this score might fluctuate the most and be annoying bookkeeping for players of dodgy characters, which I try to avoid in the game with things like abstracted wealth and supply. but if it enforces engagement with encumbrance, and thus embodiment, maybe that's actually hitting a design goal... we'll see how it performs at the table.
All in all I think it does the job of letting players "opt in" to play a dodgy character and provides a counterpart to the ARMOR system for players who aren't interested in lugging around all that stuff and hammering out the dents at the campfire every night.
ATTACK
I'm pretty pleased with this with the addition of EVADE. there was some weird dissonance in a previous iteration where players had to make a check to dodge ranged attacks, which I wasn't satisfied with, that EVADE now covers instead. there's a range of results I find pleasing that are all still resolved in one roll per side: one combatant might miss while another scores a hit, both might hit, both might miss, if you alpha-strike someone they don't get a counterattack, etc.
CRITS
the big thing I'm curious about in playtesting is how crits will perform at the table. I've gone back and forth about "2x damage" vs. "pierces armor," but I'd like it to do the same thing every time, and there to not have to be a difference between critting different kinds of critters, you know?
there's going to be some math to iron out. crits make losing a melee round have a 1-in-36 chance of killing most characters straight up - but they're fun, and I want there to be the chance to eke out a surprising victory over a thought-insurmountable foe... to "strike a vital point", per the Fire Emblem wiki's definition of the "critical hit"... to be David against Goliath... for the dodgy critmaxxer to slay the gigantic tower knight handily with a perfect hurl of his kunai.
they're most likely going to work in the player's favor most of the time, as gaining bonus dice through gambits and clever ploys increases their odds substantially.
I have a feeling I'm reinventing Warhammer at this point. I might have to give that one a proper pondering. if you've made it this far and are interested in hopping on a playtest, drop me a line! -xx
