The Next Big Game: Combat
Feb. 18th, 2009 09:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kilroySo, Nobilis will be ending in a few months. This will make the third long-form campaign I've brought successfully to conclusion, each lasting about three years. As such, I've been idly thinking about what to do next in my odd spare moments.
There's a lot of elements floating around in my head. Lexicon. Superheroes, specifically Wild Talents. Scifi. Pulp, specifically Spirit of the Century. Online components. Star Wars Adventure. World-building. Time-travel. LARP. Steampunk. Clearly I need to narrow the field down some.
So let's think about some bits.
I've run a lot of combat in my fifteen years of GMing. I've done it as a tactical simulator where the goal is to analyze the system and find weaknesses; I've done it as a stylistic exercise in doing cool stuff to entertain the other players; and I've mixed and matched between the two poles in a half-dozen different systems. And at this point I don't actually like combat that much. One problem with combat is that with a full table of players it generally takes bloody forever, and that's boring. Another is that combat is often where RPGs feel their most artificial. Rarely do players actually think "hey, that guy shot my character in the leg, she must be in hella pain right now"-- more often, they just consider how the penalties will affect their next roll.* Yet another problem is that players really get into winning in combat, and it's easy to generate real-life conflict based on the results of a few die rolls.
So, combat is sticky. Whatever I run needs to be some combination of combat-light, combat-fast, combat-meaningful, or combat-low-stress. Otherwise I will be either too bored or too frustrated to continue.
* In other words, it's immersion breaking. It's not that combat can't be fun, but it usually feels utterly disconnected from the rest of the story.
There's a lot of elements floating around in my head. Lexicon. Superheroes, specifically Wild Talents. Scifi. Pulp, specifically Spirit of the Century. Online components. Star Wars Adventure. World-building. Time-travel. LARP. Steampunk. Clearly I need to narrow the field down some.
So let's think about some bits.
I've run a lot of combat in my fifteen years of GMing. I've done it as a tactical simulator where the goal is to analyze the system and find weaknesses; I've done it as a stylistic exercise in doing cool stuff to entertain the other players; and I've mixed and matched between the two poles in a half-dozen different systems. And at this point I don't actually like combat that much. One problem with combat is that with a full table of players it generally takes bloody forever, and that's boring. Another is that combat is often where RPGs feel their most artificial. Rarely do players actually think "hey, that guy shot my character in the leg, she must be in hella pain right now"-- more often, they just consider how the penalties will affect their next roll.* Yet another problem is that players really get into winning in combat, and it's easy to generate real-life conflict based on the results of a few die rolls.
So, combat is sticky. Whatever I run needs to be some combination of combat-light, combat-fast, combat-meaningful, or combat-low-stress. Otherwise I will be either too bored or too frustrated to continue.
* In other words, it's immersion breaking. It's not that combat can't be fun, but it usually feels utterly disconnected from the rest of the story.