We’ve had a couple of essays about combat with regards to video games here on the site. (Here is the one that I wrote, here is the one that Patrick wrote.) Given the tabletop gaming we’ve been exploring recently, I’ve started thinking about combat and how it works for when you’re throwing dice and telling a story (or, I suppose, when you’re throwing dice and *NOT* telling a story).
The first way to engage in combat is the good old fashioned dice grinding. You’ve got a fighter, a thief, a cleric, and a mage, they’ve got kobolds, kobolds, and kobolds. Throw down. Go up a level. Get a +1 sword, +1 dagger, +1 mace, +1 sling and do it again. Eventually you’ll reach the point where it’s the 4 of you against a Big Bad in his own right and you’ll have to use the cleric to buff the fighter who will chip away at the Big Bad while the thief gets into backstabbing position and the mage can cast, oh, color spray at him. Storytelling is less an issue than the image of sparks flying. Big dice being thrown, big hits, big misses. (Aside: When we played Descent
And, when you set it up like *THAT*, it makes the other kind of combat, the “narrative” combat, seem almost tame in comparison… but I think I’ve got a good example of a fight that isn’t particularly interesting in a dice-rolling way but makes for an absolutely *AMAZING* example of narrative combat.
Remember the lightsaber fight between Obi-Wan and Darth Vader in Star Wars (eventually Star Wars: A New Hope)?
Here:
There are two ways to look at this fight. The first is to turn the sound off, ignore that we know oh-so-much about each of these characters, remember all of the Jet Li, Donnie Yen, and Jackie Chan movies we’ve seen and then to say that this is the dumbest sword fight that has ever been filmed by anybody, anywhere. I mean, seriously, look at the sword fight between Ray Park and Ewan McGregor at the end of Phantom Menace!!! Now *THAT* was a sword fight!!!
The second is to look at this fight and to say “you know what, there is a lot (I mean a lot a lot) going on there… so much so that those swords are almost extraneous.”
And that brings me to our own Alan Scott and how he, in a comment to Patrick’s post, said:
And then there’s the king of “combat is another puzzle” games: Monkey Island.
I’ve said before that Secret of Monkey Island has the best combat system in any video game ever. It fits both the theme of the game (swasbuckling adventure parody) and the genre (point-and-click adventure). The system can be quickly grasped by the beginner, but has non-obvious strategic elements.
The game explains that any fool can wave around a sword with a bit of training, but that real mastery of swashbuckling swordfightery is more about the dialogue. Nobody cares whether you’re actually a better swordsman–It’s the clever quips and stunning turns of phrase that make you a master.
So after providing your character with the requisite bit of training, it leaves you to develop your sharp wit. Combat is handled with a series of insults and counter-insults. At first your character knows two or three insults and only one counter-insult, but as you encounter the island’s various roaming pirates, you’ll be targeted by new insults (which will be added to your repertoire), and the pirates will respond to your insults with counter-insults (which are likewise added to your repertoire).
Once you’ve gained sufficient skill, you can go up against the Swordmaster. The swordmaster draws from a different set of insults than the player and the roaming pirates. But each of her unique insults can be countered by one of the standard counters that the player has hopefully learned–in order to defeat the swordmaster, the player has to have fought enough roaming pirates to have learned the counters, and must also be clever enough to match the counters to the Swordmaster’s new insults.
It seems to me that the perfect tabletop RPG would have elements of all of these… you’d have your dice grinding at the beginning when everybody needs to go up a level but, when you encounter the occasional Boss Fight, you’d need to shift gears away from dice grinding combat and switch out to a narrative fight. You want the hordes of kobolds at the beginning of the game… but, when you get into the fight against the Big Guy, you may as well sit down across the table from him because it’s time to have a conversation.
The thing that I am chewing on now is the issue of *HOW* to make this work, in practice, when everybody is sitting around the table…
Thoughts?
(Note: I am still sick and dosed myself with Robotussin earlier today. It was pointed out to me that I may have exceeded the recommended dosage. Apologies if that manifests itself in the essay.)
Seems fairly coherent to me. Of course I’m on a half-bottle of wine and Benadryl, so take my opinion with that weight added.
I’m thinking.
I kind of do this sort of thing informally. I’m trying to think if I can write up a formal description of it.
Cards. Go through all the quips from Monkey Island. Thumb through The Princess Bride. Search online for swordfighting snaps. Write them on blank playing cards. Look them over and think “Hm… this one is kinda lame… ooh this one is pretty darned good!” Mark them from 1-5. Don’t share the deck with anyone. The fun is being surprised.
When a combat comes up requiring this kind of conversation, have someone deal 5 cards to each participant. Look at your hands, roll to hit and play a quip. The quip’s score adds to damage and the hit roll. Thing is that the quip can be nullified by a quip with a higher score. In the result of a tie, it goes to the defender.
Give a +1 bonus if the player plays a card, says “I have something better” and says it aloud. Judge it on the table’s reaction, i.e. laughter or “oooh burn”. If it’s that good, add it to the deck for next time.
Here’s the fun part. Someone can interrupt (using up their held action) if they see Big Bad said “Your mother smells of elderberries!” and the ally’s ripost was “No u!” The interrupting player can chime in to defend saying “You’re like school in summertime, no class” and add that to the defending player’s defense stats or subtract that from the attacker’s score.
I’d recommend 52 cards. Go to Compleat Gamer and see if they have the game 1000 Blank White Cards. Get a sharpie. Go nuts.
When you get these printed up and for sale, let me know because I’m buying this game and I can think of a dozen or so friends that would as well.
I’ve always been a fan of how a lot of Jidai Geki do face-offs between the main characters. Essentially that it’s a test of wills and the first to falter leaves an opening. In purely PnP terms, I’d do it as a set of opposed rolls for something akin to initiative. Eventually someone will slip up, and in that instant you can make that necessary roll that’ll end it right then and there.
It’s interesting because I feel like I am completely agreeing with you, but then I realize that I want to flip things around and hand-wave the kobold fight and go all-in on the dice in the boss fight.
This is one thing I like about the FATE rule zero: decide the effect you want first, then figure out the mechanic from there. The use of fate points should also award saying cool things or doing the unexpected. “I’m going to invoke my aspect ‘You’re Not the Boss of Me.’ I say ‘when I left you, I was but a learner; now I am the master!’ and gain a +2 to my Menace roll.”
I view this all a little differently. I just see and insult attack buff mechanism instead of actual flavor to the game. You may get a chuckle out of it, but why does “Your mother smells like Elderberries!” really hit home against some-dumb-guy?
To me, the only way to set up a narative fight is to have set the stage with both the PC and NPC. They need to know each other and dislike/hate each other and each others views. Take the Obiwan v Darth fight. Part of what made this intriguing is it gives you a glimps of the back story between the two and you sit there running senerios through your head about what might have happenned. The E1 fight with Parks, you know little about Park’s Sith and the Jedi have never met him before, so the fight has no background to work with to try and do anything meaningful with the narative. They could have atempted some, like the Jedi trying to get him to tell them who his Sith master is, but even that would not have added much narative to the fight. In the end it was almost like a random encounter.
So no matter what roleplaying system you are using, the GM need to set up the good guys and bad guys to make a narative fight between the two have meaning to me.
Recently stumbled upon this free e-book about game design, which has some essays in it that are at least tangentially related to your question:
http://www.etc.cmu.edu/etcpress/content/tabletop-analog-game-design