"Is it dead yet?" thoughts and suggestions to improve my combat mechanics?

Making
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I’m working on a Heartbreaker (who isn’t?). A lot of the mechanics flow into each other and are shaping up to an elegant whole, but one area I’m not happy with is the rules for combat.

The basics - Players make all the rolls (roll to beat modified target number). Failure doesn’t mean “you miss” it means the opponent does something. “You go to line up a shot but they see you draw your bow and charge before you can loose.” That sort of thing.

No initiative - Play proceeds clockwise around the table until everyone has gone (1 round). First Player status moves 1 place counterclockwise around the table. If you acted last one round, you’ll be first the next round. This means the turn order is functionally dynamic and prevents the players at the head of the table from always acting first. Enemies act on failed rolls, and also on the GM’s turn (which happens whenever the round reaches the GM).

Combat track - At the start of the fight the GM sets a track at 4x to 6x the number of PCs in the fight. So, for example, a Party of 4 would have a combat track of 16 to 24. The PCs start at one end, their opponents start at the other end.

Successes on the part of the PCs fill in their end of the track. Failures fill in the enemy. If either side has more than half the track at the end of the round, then they’ve “won” the combat. That can mean a ton of things narratively. Routing the opponents, killing everyone, surrender, etc.

No hit points - The best you can expect is a Success. This meters the combat. It’s going to last at least 2 whole rounds (assuming players roll extremely well) and will probably last longer. Since failures count as progress for the enemy, stalemate is impossible. One side or the other is getting over the halfway mark.

I’ve playtested this part and it works quite well. The combats feel fast and dynamic. Players are often trying creative things because there’s no one-best-way for them to make progress, and without dumping the entire ruleset here, they’re accruing attrition from fights at a decent rate.

So what’s the problem? Enemy health.

Right now, I’ve no useful system for tracking the survival or death of opponents. I’ve just been improvising. If someone lands a particularly clever or effective attack, I up the body count. It’s all way too loosy-goosy for me. Either opponents are dying too easily, or they become success sponges that advance the track but stay alive well past when they should.

So I’m looking for suggestions/ideas of how to moderate or mitigate that. Some method of deciding how many hits a given opponent will take before they go down without going full on hit-points on the problem.

Thoughts?

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First, sounds interesting and exciting! I love systems that escape HP well.

Question though: does this mean all fights are “balanced”?

If I have 4 experienced adventurers vs. a single goblin, do I still set the combat track to 16?

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Ballance isn’t handled through the track since more powerful players (or monsters) can’t advance the track quicker. It works more like a timer for the length of the fight. For a short/brutal fight I just make the track a lot shorter, like 2x the number of PCs (meaning it’ll usually end in 1 round).

The difficulty of the fight is moderated by the Challenge of the opponents (a single stat that distills most things to a unified target number). Players have tools to modify the Challenge of a given roll both before and after the roll takes place (modifications after rolling typically cause attrition in the form of injuries or sacrificing equipment).

So let’s take your Goblin as an example. If I’m thinking of a single goblin as easy, then I’d probably give them a Challenge of 5. Rolls are done on a D12, so that’s a 66% chance of success on a flat roll.

PCs can use Aspects (slightly more structured tag-like attributes from something like Fate) as well as Equipment to Ease a Challenge.

So say our Goblin is up against someone with a Sword who also has the Skirmish (aka Melee) skill. The Sword Eases a Challenge by 1. The skill Eases a Challenge by 2. Our Challenge 5 goblin is now Challenge 3 (around an 84% chance of success, only fails on a 1 or a 2).

PCs can also spend Effort on a roll. Effort is a renewable resource who’s spending is moderated by Character Level, and which is regenerated through specific roleplaying actions. But hey, it’s just a Goblin, why waste your Effort on it?

The player rolls and it’s pretty likely that they’ll score a Success. Mechanically that Success advances the track for their side… narratively though? Did they kill the goblin in one stroke? Did it fall backwards cowering from their imposing assault? Did it narrowly duck out of the way, but not before you gave it a deep cut across the shoulder?

That’s where I’m missing something elegant to adjudicate “Is it dead yet?”

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Contrast that with a much tougher opponent. Maybe the haunted revenant of a knight bound to guard a bridge? In life they were a mighty warrior, and that prowess has followed them across the veil into their tortured undead state. Something like that might be Challenge 10. Our PC with Skirmish and a Sword can still Ease that by 3, so it’s down to Challenge 7, but that’s a flat 50/50 on a D12 roll. Without further modifications, that PC would lose the same amount as they’d win.

This would cause the track to advance pretty much in lockstep from both sides. The PC succeeds half the time and fails half the time. The Successes advance the hero’s side of the track, the failures count towards the Revenant.

Unlike our Goblin friend, where the PC is very unlikely to get a bad roll (and thus the bulk of the rolls will be Successes), the Revenant is a much tenser fight because the Knight is more capable of getting to the halfway mark on the track.

However, the problem remains. It’s easy to adjudicate the failures because those trigger the rules for attrition. PCs will lose equipment or take injuries. But what about successes?

Narratively it’d make sense for the knight to survive right up to the final blow and I can just describe it as such… but that’s where I’d like to figure out something with more structure.

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So to answer your question, there is an element of balance, but PCs can absolutely get into an unfair fight that’s “too easy” or “too hard” for them. Since each PC is rolling against the Challenge of their opponent, it’s the Challenge (and all the rules that surround it) which dictate the rate at which they’re accruing successes or failures.

Your party of 4 experienced adventurers would likely kill that goblin in a single round (because I’d make the track short to keep the combat from dragging on too long, and because they’d probably all just roll Successes).

The Knight, by contrast, would probably be a full 24 step track. The PCs will need 12 Successes, and they’re either getting those successes at about a 50% rate, or they’re spending resources to move the odds in their favor (effective, but you’re using up stuff you might want for a later fight).

It’d be a pretty epic battle that’d last 3 to 6 rounds, with a LOT of blows being traded back-and-forth…

But aside from just winging it, I don’t have a good system for describing how well the PCs are doing against their opponent. If they’re doing poorly, then the narrative and the rules intersect and things are fine.

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Sounds like a game of Tug of War or foosball, where you’re getting little beads moved along your goal tracker as the other team is. There’s a great joy in foosball, sliding another bead. Maybe as much as actually scoring the goal.

In that way too, it feels like, because how numerically inclined everything is, rather than narratively inclined, that the pitch of a battle is easiest understood if it’s in front of everyone versus hidden behind the DM screen? I guess one of the aspects of Tug of War that is so intimidating and fun is that your hands are on the rope at all times and the ‘tipping point’ or end point is perpetually visible and the way that the tension is, at start, fully known and at its maximum, and as either team loses strength / stamina, the drama increases (someone loses footing, the ‘heave’ doesn’t amount to as much as the team hoped).

It seems like you’re looking for a method to help PCs & you to add narrative benchmarks to combat.. am I reading that right? You’ve got a ‘grand win’ situation, when either team gets pulled over the center line, but there’s no real means of delineating how the monk’s blows are landing versus the rogue’s backstab as successes and failures mount? Seems the curse of that initial mechanic which is that the Tug of War is about a single aspect of success as a team.

Consider leaning into it? It sounds like its creating dynamo. I dont know how you’re setting criteria for ‘what happens on a team’s win’ but it sounds like a lot is on the line all the time. Fine. What if there is no monster or player death until the ‘tug’ ends, and then everything uncoils in a narrative line? The monk’s blows stack against the Death Knight’s kneecaps, the rogues blade finally gets his line and plunges a blade in. This sort of locks everyone in a weird narrative stasis but it doesn’t seem like that’s for very long, per your description of combat speed. Sort of has the ‘hp is about your stamina’ and it isn’t until your hp runs out that you actually take the severe blow that maims you or puts you out for future fights in whatever way.

Dunno if I explained it well. Maybe let’s do a quick sample:

Death Knight v. Monk, Rogue, Fighter in Antique Library
Start of combat, players & enemy secretly choose the stakes.
Players wager they will stop fighting when enemy is subdued; enemy wagers it will stop at nothing short of death.
(Perhaps this starts players further down the track as less is required to accomplish a subdue)
Track is healthy. You set the abacus down in front of players. They gasp.
Fighter says he’ll move into engage. Fails. The knight sidesteps and engages the monk.
The monk enters a graceful stance and prepares. Success.
The rogue wants to strafe around. Fails. The knight’s head turns quickly like a pitcher watching a base-stealer.
The fighter tries to grab the knight’s attention. Success.
The monk moves into engage. Success.
The rogue wants to use the distraction. Failure. The knight’s sword releases a cloud of blackness that swarms the room behind it.
The fighter tosses something at the knight’s feet, a pair of strangling irons. Success.
The monk leaps off the table nearby. Success.
The rogue plunges into the darkness. Success. And the abacus bead pushes over the center line. DM narrates a subdual through a synthesis of the current state of affairs: the knight glances down at the strangling irons as the monk’s flying kick takes it in the chin. As the irons connect their magical links the rogue is waiting in the darkness for the creature to fall, which it does, and then its a garrot line around the neck held tight against the floor and the death knight is out.

I don’t know. To me there’s something kind of Sherlock Holmesy (the RDJ flick) about it? (Example).

I think I’m trying to weave in a little of that Max Payne Bullet Time with the RDJ slow-mo with a weird aspect of future-gazing; mostly because the tension has nothing to do with individual narrative moments and everything to do with whether that center line gets crossed.

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Hey there! Thanks for sharing—I enjoy hearing what people are cooking up. I really like that conventional attacks and creative tactics both contribute to victory. A few questions occurred to me:

  1. What happens if a PC can’t reduce a challenge below 8? Because they have a sub-50% chance of success—and failure advances the enemies’ track—then isn’t their best move to pass their turn (if able)?
  2. For simplicity’s sake, consider a one-on-one fight between a PC with no aspects or equipment vs. a goblin with Challenge 5. The PC has a 66% chance to succeed each individual roll, and they need to accumulate two successes before two failures. The odds of the PC winning the overall contest are ~74%, so why not have the PC make a single roll at Challenge 4?
  3. If a PC has one particularly strong aspect or piece of equipment, why wouldn’t they use that aspect or equipment every turn to maximize their chances of success?
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Yes, I’ve found that it works best if the track is a matter of public knowledge. However, I’d push back against the statement that it’s “numerically inclined”. In play I’ve found that action scenes are quite dynamic and narrative because the math is much simpler than to-hit and HP values. Players try new things because there’s no way to optimize the progress of the track.

Yes, exactly. Benchmarks for failures are built right in to the system. I’m trying to avoid just dumping a whole ruleset into this thread, but failures in action scenes lead to attrition (typically injuries or lost equipment) so it’s super easy to narrate what exactly happened depending on the loss they take.

Success, by contrast, is harder to benchmark.

This isn’t as much of an issue when dealing with a boss or other One Big Opponent. You can just have blows land without it going down until the final blow that caries the party over the finish line. Groups opponents are the biggest sticking point. Say, a cadre of 6 bandits, or a pack of wolves.

I like your idea/description of winding up for one consequential strike, and that could work as a patch on the problem, but ideally I’d rather leave the system more flexible than that. People attempting or even succeeding on strikes mid-combat rather than putting guard rails on the players saying that they can’t actually hit until the final blow.

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Some of this is tricky to explain because I’m trying to avoid infodumping the entire ruleset into a forum post. The engine revolves heavily around “Effort”, a renewable resource that allows you to dynamically drop the target number of a given roll. Applying Effort eases a Challenge by 1 per Effort spent. You can also spend Efffort after rolling to “Push Through” a failure, but doing so is more expensive (2 Effort for every +1 on your roll). Pushing Through also allows you to accept injuries or sacrifice Equipment for additional +1s.

This is all based on Cypher System, which backs one of the longest campaigns I’ve ever run. I hate Cypher’s math and it’s 5e-ish fiddlyness, but the Effort mechanics are honestly brilliant. Players are constantly weighing their available reserve of Effort vs how badly they want an easy roll. The result is that rolls are dynamic. A given Level (Cypher’s needlessly confusing term for Target Number) is rarely static as different PCs will approach a problem differently and spend more or less effort on it.

In practice, PCs tend to succeed a lot more than they fail, but they do so by burning through their resources. It turns often capricious dice rolls into the loaded question of “how badly do you want this?”

Even discounting Effort, refusing to act at all will just bring you around to the enemy’s turn faster. Then you’re forced to react to whatever they’re trying to do. In this way the opponent has a small advantage in the action economy, as they act on failed rolls and also act on the GM’s “turn” around the table.

I know the lone goblin was brought up earlier in the thread, but thinking about it, I wouldn’t use this system at all for an easily dispatched single opponent. Instead I’d deal with a fight that lasts only one or two hits by narrating it as part of the normal conversation. The track largely exists to simulate opponents who shouldn’t go down too quickly.

In other words, this system exists both to manage the chaos of a melee, but also to slow the PCs down. I’m trying to avoid the 5e problem of “Oh, it’s my turn? I take 16 actions, 3 bonus actions, and deal 8,345 damage, half as Holy and half as Fire.”

However, that’s kind of a diversion from your question. Leaving aside that a lone goblin is simple, why not summarize the multi-step process of a fight into one roll? I’d say the same argument could be made of practically any combat system. Why not eliminate all variables and summarize it as a single roll?

I’d argue that the variables are kind of the point. They’re what change from moment-to-moment. If the situation is wholly static, “I hit it with my axe”, “it hits you with it’s cleaver”, then yeah, that’s pretty boring and I’d rather condense it, but that’s not usually how things go in any system. Fights are often about how the situation changes from one turn to the next.

Also, failures don’t just advance the track, they result in attrition. Failures usually mean taking injuries, which wear the PC down. Multiple rolls mean multiple opportunities to receive (or avoid) injuries.

The expectation is that they often will. If you’re playing a traditional martial character, it makes perfect sense that you’re going to use your sword along with the Skirmish skill for most of a fight. An archer will constantly reach for their bow, etc.

Aspects and equipment have bounded usefulness however. Most only ease a Challenge by 1. Skills ease a Challenge by 2. You can only pick 1 aspect and one piece of equipment to use on a given roll, and what you’re using has to make narrative sense.

In this way, your stats and equipment function like a few points of free Effort that you get on many of your rolls, and depending on the Challenge of the roll, they alone may be enough to make you comfortable rolling without investing Effort.

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Thanks! Your response clarified a lot of things I’d been confused about.

That’s fair—most combat systems involve a lot of rolls because designers care about, as you put it, “how the situation changes from one turn to the next.” (I know you have different design goals, but a good one-roll combat system would unironically suit my needs really well haha)

Ah, that’s good to know. I understood that rolls require some fictional positioning, but it wasn’t immediately apparent to me how advancing (or not advancing) the track influences the fiction in turn.

And assuming the same is true of monsters, then I’d imagine many of the tactics in a combat involve attempting to disable the opponents’ most effective skills/equipment while enabling your allies to leverage their best available tools. That’s cool!

Regarding your original question, one possibility could be to track how the players advance the combat track. For example, if they engage in straight-up violence, the referee could write a “V,” or if the characters attempt to intimidate their enemies to cause a retreat, the referee could write an “I.” Then when the combat ends, the referee could reference the means the players relied on most to determine what happens. A fight than the players win by leveraging violence eight times would end differently than one in which they primarily entangled, blinded, or confused the enemy

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I’m not sure it’s congruent with your design, this is my first thought to solve the “How’d /Did it die?” question.

Could simply be a roll table. I like 2d3 bc it’s short, sweet and creates a most likely outcome.

  1. Stunned for 1 round
  2. Out for the fight, you’ll see this guy later.
  3. It’s going to die in 1 round unless aided by an ally.
  4. Yup, it died.
  5. Dead. And make dramatic.

Not quite a match, but could trigger a better idea.

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I appreciate everyone’s input on this. I think I’m going to shelve the idea for now and revert to a slightly more traditional design for the combat.

At the end of the day there’s a structural flaw in this system: Namely that it takes away meaningful choices for the players about who they’re trying to knock out of the fight, and it doesn’t have an elegant mechanism for figuring out when one or more foes die or flee.

The discussion helped clarify that my initial question wasn’t something obvious that I’m missing.

I may revisit this though if a bolt of lightning strikes and a good answer presents itself.

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It could make an interesting board game. On the surface it reminded me of Junk’d a car racing and combat game.

Somewhere I read that many product design teams create a set of “fail criteria” to help counteract the natural bias to see things as working when they’re actually not. Looks like you found something to add to your list.

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I think practically any light ruleset can be hit with that critique. Heck, there are parts of Gloomhaven that are more complex than Blades in the Dark.

Mechanically I think RPGs can learn quite a lot from Boardgames. Boardgames are often obsessed with finding compelling mechanics that offer a sweet spot between complexity, meaningful choice, and balance. Especially when it comes to crunchy rules like combat, you can do a lot worse than being “as good as a boardgame”.

The point about failure criterion is a good one. I started this thread because I’d hit something that made the idea a no-go. I was just hoping someone else would see a clean solution.

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Apologies if I came off as being negatively critical. Sometimes I feel the true purpose of an experiment is to fail. Which prompts me to ask “How can I use this result?” or “Where would this result be useful?”

So actually, kudos for having the guts to share it and risk uncertainty about what would bounce back. I’d be curious to know what you end up doing with this if you ever do. :slight_smile: