These blog notes offer suggestions to add storytelling and tactical opportunities to combat in RPGs. Too often, combat is simply a war of attrition with little of the drama seen in sword-and-sorcery fiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
I want to achieve four goals:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI attack the monster.\u201d \u201cRoll to hit.\u201d \u201cI rolled a 15.\u201d \u201cYou miss.\u201d There is monotony in generating random numbers with modifiers to see if something happened or didn\u2019t. The first blog post contextualizes combat actions; it helps players realize the implications of their choices, offers storytelling guidance for GMs, and provides tactical mechanisms to make combat more exciting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe monster claws you for 17 damage.\u201d \u201cI still have 58.\u201d \u201cNext round. Roll for initiative.\u201d Compelling RPG combat is more than just whittling the opposition\u2019s hit points down to zero. The second blog post gives ideas for how to conceptualize damage that balances epic heroism with believability. It offers increased agency in the consequences of combat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The proposals here are intended to work with any combat system that relies on deterministic or random number generation that use modifiers to determine combat outcomes. Some of it could be adapted to more storytelling-focused RPGs, such as Amber Diceless Roleplaying<\/em>. Each idea can work on its own and does not have internal dependencies. They can be adapted for paper-and-pencil RPGs, computer RPGs, or tactics wargames. I\u2019ll generally use AD&D for my examples. Old AD&D.<\/p>\n\n\n\n None of these ideas are earth-shattering and have likely been put into rulebooks eons ago. I\u2019m writing them down for myself to help structure future game systems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" These blog notes offer suggestions to add storytelling and tactical opportunities to combat in RPGs. Too often, combat is simply a war of attrition with little of the drama seen in sword-and-sorcery fiction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[14,15,13],"class_list":["post-159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-combat-notes","tag-combat","tag-dynamic-storytelling","tag-rpg"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dorcgames.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dorcgames.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dorcgames.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dorcgames.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dorcgames.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=159"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/dorcgames.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":167,"href":"https:\/\/dorcgames.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159\/revisions\/167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dorcgames.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dorcgames.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dorcgames.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}