Environmental 'combat': breaking the link between tactics and swinging swords

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For the past few months I’ve been settling in to a new country, slightly disconnected from my old gaming group and working on meeting new roleplayers. To fill the gap, I’ve been meeting up with people and playing a lot of board games.

While I know it might be different for some of the passionate Pathfinder and 4e players out there ( I guess they’re not on this forum?..) my RPG sessions have never had much in common with board games. We have combats now and again, but always theatre of mind, and with relatively lightweight game systems. Most of the time my players are exploring strange places and talking themselves into paranoia spirals about harmless NPCs because I happened to mention they had slicked back hair. Our games, I suppose, are more about strategy than tactics: how do you avoid the difficult fight, obtain the magical maguffin, or recruit the locals to your cause? and its kinda funny because we all agree that we actually quite like tactical thinking and yet we don’t really want to dedicate so much narrative time to the actual hack and slash: a few tense skill rolls is enough.

So there I was – playing Everdell, deeply engrossed in a calculation of whether I needed to prioritise collecting wood to get my farm established before Spring came, or if my rivals will steal the last of the river stones in the meantime – when it finally struck me that if board games can be rich in tactics and not have anything to do with violent combat, why are there so few RPGs that engage with the same ideas? The only system in this line I really know much about is Burning Wheel’s Duel of Wits, although I’ve never quite got BW to work for me.

Well anyway, I’ve been running an on and off stone-age fantasy game online with the Worlds Without Number system. My players are sailors and explorers, and so we’re doing lots of wilderness travel. I wanted to make their choices matter on their journeys, but I didn’t want to reduce everything to “OK now roll Exert to climb the mountain, roll Survive to find food”, nor did I want to start a precise accounting of supplies. So I took inspiration from the board games, and I’ve been working on expanding the lightweight combat system that comes with Worlds and remapping it to work for so-called Environmental Perils.

Below I put some non-exhaustive details of the prototype Environmental Perils system. So far we’ve used these rules for ‘Climbing The Icewing Cliff’, ‘Sailing Through The Great Storm Wall’ and ‘Crossing the Starving Isles’.

Highlights:

I rewarded my players with a magical Oar that gives +1 during ocean perils. They were just as excited as if they found a magic sword (because in a way they did)

I starved my players, they passed out on the open sea, and now are captured by cannibals. They loved it because they didn’t just fail a travel roll or forget to mention buying 24 bags of fish. Instead we had a thirty min scene where they could make reasoned choices about whether to prioritise foraging or rapid movement, came up with some out of the box ideas to get bonuses, and ultimately only just failed due to some really unlucky RNG.

Issues:

We’re sometimes stuggling to make tactical actions feel natural or diegetic. I don’t think combat is especially suited to this kind of rule set, so I think this is just a case that we’re so used to DnD tropes (Attacks of Opportunity, Charge Bonuses etc.) that they just feel natural even when they’re not actually that logical taken on their own in all cases.

I’m interested to hear suggestions, questions or criticism, either of the broader line of thinking or any rule specifics.

Scrappy Rules Summary:

An environmental encounter is a perilous situation that warrants more than a mere skill role. It is in many ways a direct analogue of combat, with many actions and stats abstracted to fit more diverse kinds of challenges. An encounter is defined by the following key characteristics:
• The Peril – The consequence of failure. e.g. the party falls to its death, the party is shipwrecked etc.
• The Goal – What must the party do to overcome the encounter. e.g. reach the mountaintop, find water, reach a safe beach etc.
• Threats – The equivalent of hostile NPCs, these are the one or more distinct dangerous elements in the encounter. More on these below.
• Zones – One or more locations in the encounter, which may be moved between. Some actions will be limited to targets within the current zone, or only outside the current zone.
• Pace – How long a turn represents. Fleeing a boulder Indiana Jones style might warrant a standard 6-second turn, while crossing a desert might feature week-long turns!
The key game play loop of combat is preserved, but many rolls take on new meanings:
• A PC will roll to meet the challenge posed by a particular Threat (As rolling to hit against an NPC)
• If they overcome the Threat’s Challenge Class (as Armour Class) they make Progress (deal damage) against that Threat.
• When the party have made Progress against a Threat equal to its Progress Target (as hit points), the Threat has been overcome.
• Likewise, Threats will ‘attack’ one or more PCs each turn, and successful hits will damage the PC’s hit points, which in this context represent their resolve and determination.
• For now, players will use their normal AC for simplicity, but I have thoughts…
• If a PC is reduced to zero hit points they have run out of energy, blood, morale or simply good ideas, and are unable to further contribute to the encounter.
• If all PCs are reduced to zero hit points, The Peril eventuates, which may or may not be lethal, but will definitely be undesirable.
• If the PCs overcome all Threats then they achieve The Goal.

Below are the actions a PC can take during an Environmental Encounter. A player should start by saying what they want to do in the turn to address the Threats, and then work out which action matches. If multiple actions are deemed to match, the player can choose freely.

Taking the exact same action twice incurs cumulative -1 penalties due to diminishing returns, and its not narratively exciting.

• Progress Bravely (Melee Attack) – Expose yourself to risk to Meet The Challenge of a Threat in your Zone. You will always make some progress
(shock damage). e.g. climbing a cliff with axe and piton, steering through a storm.
• Progress Cautiously (Ranged Attack) – Meet the Challenge of a Threat in another Zone, using your distance to make a considered or savvy choice. e.g. shoot a rope and arrow up the cliff, map the path between rocks ahead.

• Move (Move) – move from one zone to a neighbouring zone.

• Protect Self – gain +4 AC by taking mitigative action. Such action is likely temporary and specific to you: otherwise you are making Progress and should roll as such

Damage: You can’t fight thirst with a sword or gravity with a bow! Instead of tools of war, more mundane tools will determine how much Progress is generated by a successful Meet a Challenge roll.
For simplicity:
• No tool at all, Brave: 1d4 (shock 1), Cautious: 1d4
• Improvised/poorly suited tool, Brave: 1d6 (shock 1), Cautious: 1d4
• generally suited tool, Brave: 1d8 (shock 2), Cautious: 1d6
• Perfectly suited tool, Brave: 1d10 (shock 2), Cautious: 1d8

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I think this is an interesting approach. In some ways it reminds of Delving in Heart: The City Beneath, but with more options, which is an improvement. I like the abstract zones and how incurring risk creates automatic progress at the expense of safety.

I think I tend to use clocks as my “health bar” for these kinds of obstacles. Not surprisingly, I borrow a lot from FitD games—weighing position, effect, etc.—with degree of success and outcome determining how much progress a clock makes.

Is something like this a way to address the “Issue” of making decisions feel more diegetic? I dunno! But that’s why I like FitD position and effect.

Whether my thoughts are helpful or not, I enjoyed reading your thoughts on traversing environments!

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Sounds solid and I have seen similar implementations, and used some of the same logic in resolving atypical challenges (although I haven’t done it in WWN). One thought:

“A player should start by saying what they want to do in the turn to address the Threats, and then work out which action matches.”

In my experience this is the challenging part. For some players, it will be easy (fiction-first is how they’re basically always playing, and the mechanical implementation of their choice is an afterthought). But other players are not going to be able to ignore the “moves” when framing their action, because they are more technical, mechanics-first players. They’re going to want to work backward from the outputs. In a board game, this is not really a problem for them, because the fiction is always downstream of the mechanics. But in an RPG, where that relationship between mechanics and story can go either way (sometimes even in the same session), I’ve seen this really trip people up.

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I’ve never found wilderness rules that worked for me. I agree that I want players to feel involved and have agency.

One extreme is the players saying they want to go to this town that’s five days away, and I would narrate for about a minute the progression of landscapes until they arrived. Maybe I’d throw in an encounter. But it didn’t feel exciting and I don’t think the players enjoyed travelling.

Another extreme (subjective to my references and the games I played) are the games where you count rations, you roll not to get lost, forest is this speed, clear terrain is this speed, you can roll for forage. When I read these rules, I thought it was exactly what I needed. It’ll give them choices, it might make travelling more unpredictable, exciting or threatening. But the reality is that in my experience, they’re pretty uninteresting choices, the threats are really unflavorful (you die of starvation) and it’s not really exciting.

I have at least three or four games that I bought specifically to read their travelling rules.

I read my PDFs of Dolmenwood a few times and I feel that the hexmap is so filled to the brim with content that it might run better. Every hex movement leads to something. There’s not twelve hexes of clear terrain between two forests. And the fact that many hexes are owned by some factions is another layer of decision making. It might lead to interesting choices “do we take the shortest route, but have to go through enemy territory”. But once again, how it reads and play are very different.

At first glance, your system seem to be closer to my second example (the old-school D&D hex travelling). Might be a bit too systemic to my taste. It some cases, it’s definitely possible to make a failure interesting. But I’m not sure I’d be able to make most of these perils interesting. Failure seems undesirable. It’s like designing a room where a thin rope bridges two cliffs. I did this once, and as I played it and a player failed his roll, I found myself not wanting him to die by falling. It’s pretty uninteresting.

I think 4E skill challenges had an approach closer, where it had a framework where you were trying to achieve some number of success before a number of failures, but players had to basically use different skills and describe how to would progress into the challenge in the fiction. But once again, it often lead to player scanning their skill list to find something fitting, as opposed to finding a solution in the fiction and then checking what skill is appropriate.

I think your system would achieve a similar dynamic, but using very different mechanics.

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contrarian take here: for my games, I am leaning away from creating any new procedures and relying on just coming up with throwing players into situations that require interesting choices.

so, for example, when dealing with wilderness exploration, I don’t try to invent a richer procedure; instead I just spend time thinking and reading about wilderness exploration. see what sort of challenges people faced, and then turning it into a situation for the players to explore with purely traditional mechanics-- basically: saves, attribute tests, inventory.

so taking climbing for example, I’ll Google around, find something like this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/climbing/comments/be7xwu/whats_your_most_outrageous_climbing_story/

then i’ll turn some of those into “climbing events”, to use as a consequence of failing a test.

looking quickly there is a fun one there, about the rope disturbing a baby spider nest, and the spiders just coating the rope. fantasy that up (could be baby monster anything’s) and that’s an interesting choice. jump onto a ledge? just get covered in the baby whatever’s? climb faster? try to burn them without burning the rope? “charm” spell the babies? all just regular mechanics brought into an interesting situation.

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Thanks all for the involved engagement, its really cool to chat about this stuff in detail.

@greenmirror
I saw a review of Heart and I thought the Delving mechanic sounded interesting, but never got round to checking it out. I struggle a bit with games that are hyper-specific in their setting/premise: I normally prefer things with a bit more creative freedom in world building. Is that a valid concern here, or does Heart play well for more generic settings? The abstract zones work great at the table, but in some cases it can be difficult to map out what they should be. I’m developing a gut feeling for generating them but haven’t managed to codify the process yet.

I think the link to clocks in FitD is a great observation and I hadn’t made the connection. The main difference is that clocks are generally more discrete and deterministic: 4-6 steps on the track, with progress defined by position/effect. Whereas I’ve been running Progress more like an HP pool with 10-50 steps and rolled advancement. I’m not sure how much practical impact that has on encounter feel though, I might have to experiment.

@cryptickeyway Yes I have one player who leans that way. To be honest I view this as a bit of a soft rule, as I don’t normally have any issues letting some players be hyper-mechanical while others prioritise story beats over optimised play. In fact, I think a system like this is a way to reel those players into the world a bit more: now they have a mechanical reason to care about more than just their shiny weapons.

@samB I’ve never run a hexmap, I always go with a hexcrawl. That lets me focus on cool flavourful ‘stuff’ and ignore uninteresting filler, while also not having to sweat too much about precise distances. In my stone-age campaign, I’m justifying this as everything being pre-cartography, so ‘maps’ are just series of directions, memorised or encoded with knotted string. The lengths I’ll go to to avoid graph paper :smiley:

On your lethality point, is failing against a club-wielding troll any less lethal than falling off a bridge? But it one your character made many successive choices, where the odds slowly shifted against them. Skill tests haven’t clicked for me because they don’t have that combative back and forth element.

I always communicate to my players explicitly what the consequence of failure would be at the beginning of a scene if at all plausible, and let them decide if its worth the risk. I imagine only a foolhardy group would leap to tightwalk across the cliff on a rope without searching for some other option.

Here is how I would implement your example under this system, adding the conceit that the players are being pursued by a horde of goblins and so must hot-foot it across the gap ASAP:

Crossing the Rope Bridge

The Peril: If they fail, their resolve breaks leaving them paralysed in place to be captured by goblins. Alternatively they can drop to whatever fate lies beneath them ( Depending on how much I blamed the PCs for their situation I may make them individually roll odds to avoid a splattery death and drop the survivors into a spider’s web, or wizard’s ancient feather fall warding, etc. )

Pace (fast): 1 round=6 seconds

The Goal: Make it to the other cliff by achieving full progress against ‘swaying rope’

Threats:

Swaying Rope, Progress 30, Challenge 11
    Won't hold forever: +2*number of players in Rope Zones, 1d10 against all.
    Don't Rock it!: Attack triggers again when PC moves from Under Rope to Above Rope zone

Ravine wind gusts, Progress 10, Challenge 15
(full progress indicates party has found their balance and the rhythm of the winds) 
    Unbalancing blast: +2 in Under Rope Zone, +6 in Above Rope Zone. 1d6


Gobbo projectiles, Progress 40, Challenge 18 
(full progress indicates goblins scared off for now, but will return if PCs fail to cross cliff)
     flurry of arrows: Only against PCs in Cliff Edge Zone, +4, 1d6, phys save or poisoned (dex - 2).
    the horde arrives: From turn 3, all PCs in Cliff Edge Zone, +10, 2d6 damage

Zones:

The cliff edge: can engage Gobbo projectiles bravely, Wind Gusts and Swaying Rope cautiously. 

Above the rope: Can engage Swaying Rope and Wind Gusts bravely

Under the rope:  Can engage Swaying Rope cautiously and Wind Gusts bravely.

So what do we have here? We have a semi-optional semi-lethal encounter, because they always have the option of yielding to the goblins and then dealing with whatever hijinks ensue at their lair. If they engage with it they have lots of different approaches.
They can try and make preparatory measures from the cliff edge (shooting arrows across with extra rope, testing the flex of the bridge, motivational pep talk for those attempting the crossing etc.) at the risk of getting shot by poisoned arrows.
They can progress bravely atop the rope ( I’d count a 10foot pole as a perfectly suited tool for balancing along) but risk the threat of the wind.
They can monkey bar under the rope to progress more slowly, but be less exposed. They might want to swing down here, get a feel for the wind (or come up with some clever mitigative measure I can’t think of right now) but then face an extra attack from the Swaying Rope later to return to the Above Rope zone.
They can even stand and fight back against the goblins, perhaps scaring them off with various hasty strategems, so they can proceed across the bridge at their leisure. This is a high risk strategy however as on turn 3 they are likely to be swiftly overrun.

As I said in my post these ideas are still quite new (to me) and not fully stress tested, but I think that such a system means that even if you do fall from the bridge and die, you will have ‘earned’ it somehow and remember it as tense and dramatic. Just like countless movie characters have fallen in the past.

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That’s a solid encounter. I think your framework works really well in terms of forcing the designer to confront players with interesting choices.

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Hey Eeldip, yeah I appreciate the opposite perspective. That can also work really well and is probably my go-to: although its a smart idea to look up climbing war stories on reddit: I hadn’t thought of that!

I would save something like I describe for situations where I have a single threat that I want to make into more than 1 skill roll. This can either add detail over the default approach (i.e. take one notorious stretch of crag, and expand the skill roll into a whole peril) or actually remove detail by putting us in to montage mode (imagine ‘Climbing the White Peak’ where each round is 12 hours), where I might get a bit bored chaining together skill-roll → outcome a dozen times.
But that could also highlight a deficiency with my GMing: there are too many good ideas out there to have an excuse to prep boring material!

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Yeah, I wouldn’t recommend Heart for a generic. I think the setting is interesting, but I, like you, like a toolbox that can convey a setting to bespoke ones. I mostly just wanted to point out Delving in Heart is represented by doing damage to the Delve’s HP pool.

If you want more steps to work through I think using a larger “HP” pool is the right way to do. I like the shorter scale of clocks because I feel they keep up momentum and tension, which can deflate or stall during a prolonged combat or other sequence. That of course is really dependent on personal preference of the table though.

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