Books like The Illusive Shift have done a lot to illuminate how diverse and shapeless the early RPG scene really was. Frankly, I love it. It’s one of those books that really confirmed a suspicion I had since I was a kid. The suspicion (while reading AD&D): There’s no way everyone is interpreting and playing this stuff one way.
Anyway, the reason why I bring up The Illusive Shift is because it inspired me to re-examine the old OSR/NSR maxims as design goals seated in something other than historical precedence. Why? Mostly because I find the aphorisms really fun to design for. I never really cared what a bunch of kids in the 80s were doing with their TSR products, and now, thanks to more recent research, it turns out knowing what they’re doing isn’t relevant.
In this article, I redefine why “Combat is a fail state” at my table when I’m striving for an OSR-designed experience.
this is why I find D&D rules annoying, and also what kinda bugs me about into the odd: combat is a bespoke resolution system. feels tacked on. I prefer systems where there is a general mechanic in figuring out how to do risky things, and just leaving it at that. picking a lock quietly and quickly, and hitting someone with a sword that is trying to kill you being resolved in the same general way.
I think combat should seamlessly work its way into play, not jarringly feel like a rules fail state. with a unified mechanic, it gets people in a more creative space during combat. like, if “hitting someone with a sword” and “cutting their belt, so their pants fall down and that causes them to trip and fall when they try to follow me” have the same mechanic, they exist in the same mental space for the players, and they feel more freedom to do interesting stuff.
UNRELATED: I can’t quite grasp what the word “elide” does that “abstract” doesn’t do. like lock picking rolls are an abstraction. all abstractions elide something. this is just me being picky about language.
I think what you’re saying is interesting, because I’d argue that in modern (5e at least) D&D, the regular attack uses the same resolution mechanic as skill challenges: Roll a d20+stat modifier+proficiency bonus vs a DC (which in combat is called AC, but a DC by any other name…), and on success, you get to hit them.
That’s certainly a valid preference to have, but one reason why many folks prefer to not have a unified mechanism for things like “conflict” is that it often has the effect of bringing every conflict to the same level as one another (which might be ok for some play styles) and it kind of homogenized how things are handled. Things end up feeling rather “samey,” and often it ends up feeling, to many, to matter very little what you actually do, as the resolution always ends up within the same confines.
Whereas separating out combat provides a kind of sharp delineation between “ok, well if its come to this you know the implications.” That’s also why I am a big fan of abstract combat, rather than super zoomed-in bespoke action-by-action play (most of the time).
So elision, much like “diagetic”, is at risk for being a term used for term’s sake when a better term already exists. Often (like diagesis) the person is mostly highlighting abstraction (or de-abstraction), but when used correctly there is at least one subtle difference when talking about elision vs. abstraction.
Elision itself the omission of detail, whereas abstraction is the re-conceptualizing of something to reduce complexity. So elision is often a part of abstraction, but it isn’t necessarily so. One can elide the obvious from a very zoomed-in sort of procedure that one would argue is not abstracted.
I use the word “elide” in the way it’s described in most dictionaries to mean omit, leave out, or glide over. It’s more about removal or handwaving something rather than scaffolding and modeling it like in abstraction.
Anyway, I forgot that elide is one of those words in rpg spaces that means something other than what it says when you google it. Like when you use the word “temperature” in the normal way around a bunch of physicists.
oh yea, you used it very clearly meaning omit in the casual language sense. in RPG talk, I often I hear it in the context where “abstracted away”, or “isn’t part of the mechanical abstraction” would work. OK, another problem is that “abstraction” in a RPG context also means something fairly different from dictionary definition. even more so than elide! but jeez, realizing that this is all my fault, I am going to stop the BANE OF ALL RPG talk… semantics.
BACK TO THE CENTRAL POINT: my personal spin is that traditional (BX clone) combat feels like a fail state because its a switch to the clunky old wargame from the general imagination game. into the odd, kinda oddly simulates this in that its a switch from the core mechanic to another mechanic. is that done specifically to highlight the “fail state” feeling? to me it just makes me feel like I used to have a lot of choices, then suddenly its the PCs facing the opponents and we just swing at each other. clever combat ideas being the exception.
(side note, I love combat in frontier scum. but because it has a sort of genre emulation feel. we move from “regular western movie scenes” to “fight scenes”, and everyone fires off their guns for a bit, then we hide behind the water trough- where in the movies we would have a bit of dialog that doesn’t make strict time sense, and in the game shots become ‘hard’ and suddenly you get back to attribute checks and damage rolls, which feels normal)
but yea, I don’t want to be PUNISHED WITH A DIFFERENT RULE SET cause we are fighting! I think the GM should use the same rules and chunk up the information in a way that works the same as any time sensitive, risky, action.
This is exactly it and what I was trying to conclude with in my article (but it’s really hard to do given all the baggage that I felt needed to be said first).
Combat feels like a fail state is OSR games because when the combat starts, the game throws out most of the stuff I like about OSR/NSR design—empty spaces, open-ended puzzles, fiction-first ideas—and switches to a different kind of ruleset where empty spaces are few and the rules lead the conversation in very regimented ways.
OH, an analogy hit me: this “combat fail state” rules change you describe feels to me like we are sitting around playing with modelling clay, and then, COMBAT HAPPENS and the GM takes that clay away and gives us a handful of legos.
RELATED: In a recent session of liminal horror, a relatively newish player in the group was just fuming at the rules regarding attacking the same opponent (damage doesn’t stack, just switches to highest damage). they just couldn’t figure out why the game logic shifted so much out of naturalistic rules to a very obtuse mechanic. to me, that was that exact moment when someone used to playing with modelling clay is suddenly annoyed at the limitations of Legos.
Anyway, I like your take on this discussion (obviously, its getting my brain juices moving). I’ve been meaning to convince some people to try my “Into the Black” house rules, which scraps into the odd’s combat fail state rule shift with black hack’s unified player facing attribute resolution system.
what is kinda neat about that theoretical system is that when --black hack’s player facing opposition to someone trying to hurt you-- is combined with --into the odd’s damage system— the way I am thinking of running it: if you defend with say, dex or willpower, you take damage to THAT attribute. anyway seems like that might be fun.
OH, an analogy hit me: this “combat fail state” rules change you describe feels to me like we are sitting around playing with modelling clay, and then, COMBAT HAPPENS and the GM takes that clay away and gives us a handful of legos.
I like that analogy a lot and I think it carries the right amount of nuance. It’s not like these systems remove creativity but they do change the way you use it.
And obviously I’m into what you’re experimenting with. I’m hacking a HP-free/Damage-free combat system. It is tough to get the right balance of rules v. rulings that I’m looking for.
Kind of. In my current playtests, player characters have a version of HP and injuries. The opposition, on the other hand, is treated almost like a puzzle or trap. You can manipulate them, hinder them, or change their fictional positioning—but the actual defeat is yes/no.
I write about it in my other blog post, the 1 HP Dragon.
Could it all change in a couple weeks? Probably. Such is playtesting.
oh yea, I remember that now. good luck with the playtest! I can see so many possibilities, but you know, the important part is the rubber hitting the road, and playtesters crashing your car in unexpected ways.
Yep, there’s tons, and they range all the way from classic adventure game to experimental, from freeform all the way up to hefty games like HarnMaster.
One big reason I have always been against “combat as a fail state” (aside from the revisionism) is that I think its kind of reductive in thinking of the ways D&D as a whole works. If we accept that combat is a fail state, then why are any of the other systems throughout the game any less of a fail state? Saving throws, reaction rolls, x-in-6, percentiles, roll-under-stat (mine most hated nemesis), etc.
All of these were added in to account for situations where referees wanted to leverage rules for a whole variety of cases. I may be projecting, but I have an indication that lots of people particularly single out combat because the newer OSR always kind of presented it as low-brow, something you do when you can’t be creative, rather than something you leverage creatively.
Oh I don’t think you are projecting. Anti combat has gotta be related to anti 4e/5e, indie peeps kinda reaction. Maybe some slight ANTI JOCK bias by nerds mixed in there? (Nerd on Nerd crime!)