Gaming Inspiration from Material Culture

[tanis]

Actually, I started work on a system of my own summer before last, but got busy with school and had to put it down. I'd been planning to announce it once I was a bit further along, but eh, lol.

I'm going to start back to work on it—and a ton of other things in my backlog—as soon as I finish building a new PC. I've got everything but the CPU and GPU, so hopefully that stuff will become more available soon and I'll be able to forge ahead. I'm still on a dual core laptop from 2011. 

I was hoping you might be interested in looking at it and giving me feedback, once I've got it ready for playtest. I also thought, in the event that I can publish it, you might be interested in working with me on a Khoras campaign setting supplement. I plan on creating my own bespoke one if I get that far, but it'd be cool to have Khoras as another option.

Of course, I still haven't built it yet, so that's all hypothetical, but still. As long as we're talking about designing new systems. 

[David Roomes]

I'd be happy to review your gaming system when you get it to a point that you're looking for feedback. And I'd be happy to help put together a Khoras supplement. Sounds like fun.

Good luck with your new PC build.

[tanis]

Thanks, man. Hopefully it all comes together soon.

[Drul Morbok]

I'd be interested in seeing your thoughts about a different combat system, as I have many problems with the D&D combat system.
Essentially I consider it
- stationary
- repetitive
- unsuited for duels

a) combatants don't seem to move much. They seem to stand where they are and exchange blows. Monks don't fight like Bruce Lee, swashbucklers don't fight like Jack Sparrow or D'Artagnan, Samurai don't fight like in Tiger&Dragon. A giant with a club doesn't chase light-armored combatants all over the place, an agile swordfighter doesn't tumble and dodge through a horde of minor opponents, hitting all of them. There's no jumping on tables, no staying out of reach and jumping in for the deciding attack...
b) Most often, if a strike with an axe and an arrow don't fell a giant, many blows and arrows will. There's no waiting for and preparing the one tricky, coordinated attack.
c) as a result, combat effectively means piling on damage. There's no point in "step back, let me handle this guy". There's no honor in a 1-on-1 the fighter of a party and the opposing chieftain, it's always encouraged to fire arrows from the second row (piling on damage).

Those might not be realism issues but rather narrative issues. But for me, roleplaying IS a narrative issue.
Tastes differ, but I once said "a good roleplaying fight ist a Fight I'd like to watch in a movie", and I couldn't name a movie where an interesting fight boils down to reducing hit points step by step.

Of course aa good DM can turn D&D fights into interesting fights, but most of the time, he does so by going beyond the rules rather than by applying the rules...

[tanis]

It's funny that you say that, Drul, because what you're describing is so very different in focus and concern from what I was thinking about, while also being a neat parallel. It makes for a really good opportunity to discuss an important distinction. Stylistic preferences versus mechanical abstractions.

See, the concerns you raise are essentially focused on maintaining genre conventions and consistency of tone—you want to play pulp/genre staple characters, and you want them to feel like they're genre appropriate. In other words, you want stylized combat which revolves around feeling like choreographed fights in fiction, especially films, typically look. It's a stylistic concern, and you're looking for the result of the combat mechanics to look a certain way. The mechanics have a role in determining that, but your focus isn't directly on them, in and of themselves.

Me, on the other hand, while I tend to stylistically prefer fights which feel like actual fights I've been in or watched happen, I'm likewise happy to play a tightly focused, genre-specific game—and if I do, then sure, swashbucklers should feel like Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power. But that's not my number one preference, and to my mind, any sufficiently developed combat system, combined with the right approach on the part of the players and DM to describing and resolving combat, can meet that need. Where some mechanics excel or fall short for me isn't in their ability to be adapted to a particular style, but rather in how well the abstractions they choose support the fundamental truth of how combat would work, procedurally. It's the difference in feeling like a certain genre, and feeling like a certain activity.

It's important to lay out that distinction, because otherwise we're in danger of equivocating on which sense of feels like we mean from moment to moment. One is window-dressing, the other is framed in mechanical terms and can be adapted to fit whatever setting is appropriate, though some solutions may more comfortably support some genre conventions over others. If we get the mechanics right, hopefully the resulting system will look right in play; that's an important way to evaluate our success, but I find it more helpful to focus directly on the mechanical perspective, and trust that by making things work like they should, the rest will follow naturally. Let me see if I can illustrate how the difference in perspective affects the thought process, and thus the design decisions.

What I want procedurally, or mechanically, is for combat to move, not like it does in movies, where everything is choreographed and focused on spectacle and looking good on camera, but like it does in person; to be oriented around doing rather than watching. Real fights often don't make good spectacles, because bodies get intertwined and things get too chaotic for an audience to easily read the action; individual actions are often as direct and focused on doing damage safely as possible, and things tend to turn into a scrum that is difficult to make out if you're not actively participating. As a result, realistic fights aren't typically depicted on-screen, so people whose primary experience of combat is film and TV often have a warped perspective of how fights work. Actors strike at one another's weapons instead of their bodies, etc. It looks better and is easier to parse in a movie, but it doesn't feel right.

D&D fights, especially lethal ones with weapons and armor, often turn into—as you say—statically trading blows until one side drops. In real life, if I have a sword or a spear and I hit you, I might kill you with one hit, and vice versa. I don't want to die, so I'm not going to just stand there and give you the opportunity. Now, if I'm in armor, especially very protective armor like plate harness, then I might be functionally invulnerable to your weapon—depending on what it is—and thus move in with little hesitation. But if we're in our shirts and pants, I might not get in striking range at all until the moment I can seize upon an opening. Real sword duels—like those described in historical accounts or depicted in combat manuals, for example—often consisted of a period of very little overt action with a lot of cautious maneuvering and judging of the situation, followed by a brief and explosive exchange. Rinse and repeat. That's a bit of an oversimplification that I'm about to complicate, but it's a good framework from which to start.

Unarmored combats with weapons aren't like fist fights or brawls; they don't go on for extended periods with lots of back and forth slugging. They're like gunfights in classic Westerns; tension ramps up, someone moves to draw, then it's all over and one cowboy hits the ground.

Armored combat is different. If you're sufficiently armored, you can take at least some kinds of hits with impunity. So you focus less on avoiding hits, and more on making yours count. If you're a man-at-arms or knight wearing steel plates fighting peasant levies in padded armor, you just walk up and poke them. If you're the peasant levy, you hope to God you and your buddies can use your superior numbers to dogpile the knight and stab him in the face or groin (or some other convenient gap) before he can manage to cleave your skulls in two. Different weapons meet different needs. Weapons that are great for carving up unarmored foes don't do much against solid steel. Weapons intended for armored wielders can be shorter than equivalent weapons intended for people who could only afford a helmet and some padding. Armored combat also tends to happen at closer distance and to favor wrestling and grappling, to the point that a lot of European armored combat manuals show moves that look remarkably similar to jiujitsu. Lots of asymmetry, etc. Also, shields were a huge part of combat prior to the development of very protective plate armor, and combat with shields is a completely separate discussion entirely. They're far too rare in many campaigns. So on and so forth.

Hell, during the early Modern period—from the Wars of the Roses and War of the Spanish Armada through to the English Civil War and other similar conflicts of the 17th Century—heavily armored cavalrymen wore bullet-proofed (as in dented, usually in the breastplate, by a musket ball to prove it could stop them), fully-enclosed plate harnesses while riding with lances, swords, and pistols, all while arquebusiers, halberdiers, pikemen, and billmen in lighter armor fought in lines and squares. Then when they went home, they wore completely different clothing and used completely different weapons to get into duels and streetfights.

Now, to some degree combat is, like everything else, just description. I can satisfy either of our stylistic preferences with the same system. It's a matter of style and focus.

But regardless of the style I'm describing, the important thing is how to respond to procedural questions like: if I'm an adventurer in a world with lethal monsters, what level of armor is sufficient to the task of protecting me while also being realistic to wear for long periods of cross-country travel? What cultural and technological context am I trying to emulate at this particular moment? What weapon sets make up the standard picture of a nation's warriors? Who's going to be my opponent, and what does their loadout look like? What materials are things made out of? Can they be damaged or cause damage to my opponent's gear in turn? If I have a sub-optimal weapon for this particular match-up, what options do I have? Can I use my sword like a club? Is this a duel or a melee with multiple combatants on one or both sides? Maybe a full-scale pitched battle? How can the combat system reflect these material differences in fun and easily graspable ways that allow players' meaningful choices to extend to the things they carry instead of just their skills or what prop with 1d8 damage they want to carry to complement their image of their character, and all while avoiding crunch?

At the same time, the focus might not be on monsters, but on human opponents. Or on urban street combat rather than armored battles. Whatever the context, how can the mechanics address the relevant concerns in a way that does them justice, while also (ideally) supporting multiple and diverse stylistic goals?

I believe that with properly designed mechanics, those questions can be answered in a satisfying way, regardless of stylistic preferences.

Another way to put it might be: if I'm playing a game like D&D, am I going for a classic OD&D dungeon delve, where the focus is getting loot from dangerous and distant places and getting home alive? Or am I going for a murder hobo hack & slash focused on grappling with deadly foes and coming out victorious? Either way, both of those playstyles lend themselves to combat being lethal and high-stakes. But if I want to inhabit stories in those worlds that are comparable in depth and breadth to the stories people tell in less deadly campaigns, then the lethality of combat should change how my character is outfitted, and thus even if my orientation to play is genre-focused and swashbuckling rather than trying to be a simulation of historical combat for its own sake, my character will still look and act differently. Perhaps I'm telling the same story, but instead of Errol Flynn playing Captain Blood, it's Russel Crowe in Master and Commander. Both have naval combat, but one is highly stylized and the other, while still stylized, is stylized in a way that seeks to more believably mimic reality.

But those same mechanics could just as easily liven up the Errol Flynn style game, if they're designed correctly, because the point of verisimilitude isn't that we want to actually play out exactly what it's like to live in that world, just that we want enough of the real experience reflected in the game to inform and enrich our experience of the roleplaying. Even most people who really like "realism" don't want to have to experience every moment of every mundane action in minute detail, they just want the interactions they do have to feel like they're grounded in the real thing. Unless you specifically want full-on "Inigo Montoya being stabbed repeatedly only to be reinvigorated by his desire for revenge and suddenly overcome all injury as he progressively becomes more capable until finally besting his nemesis" level power fantasies, having the more "realistic" combat system isn't going to cause any issues for the table going for a more overtly stylized result.

While that probably didn't address any specific thought you had, hopefully it lays out a perspective on how lower-level mechanical choices can influence the sorts of higher-level design considerations you're talking about.

[Drul Morbok]

Well, the more I think about it, the less I think the D&D scenario ist fitting for what I aim for - and I tend to assume you will at least have to go for either a rather complicated system, or a thoroughly reduced world.

Of course I do not have the factual knowledge you have, not even close, so please correct me where I'm wrong:

I think that the armor and weapon choices of D&D and similar systems represent rather specialized unit types meant to be deployed in squads in a stone-paper-rocks-logic.

Spears and lances would be erected against charging enemies, two-handed swords could chop of the heads of erected lances, axes would chop down wooden shields, maces or hammers with a spike are devastating to armor.
Those unit types where not meant to be fight in mixed teams like a party, which would be closer to a modern small team of elite forces.

So I think many weapon-armor-combinations do not make much sense in an "open" setting of "one weapon fits all", to be employed against a wide range of threats.
D&D-like systems tend to pitch opponents from different historical and geographic settings, but aim to be "balanced" by doing so.

Things get even more complicated when non-human opponents are involved.
I guess from a historical realistic point of view, there's close to no evidence of fighting a pack of lions or wolves with a two-handed sword, so a "realistic" system should exclude many fights from happening in the first place.
Even more so for beasts like horse-sized spiders or a hippogriff or a Hydra.

In a world where ogre raids are common, ogres would not be fought with melee weapons, but by archers on horseback circling around the brute, never allowing it to get close... totally different unit types and fighting styles would develop rather than applying historical units against in non-historical fights.

I think this is a common problem of many fantasy settings...the world looks pseudo-historical (the "typical" look most people associate with a castle is an idealization of later ages anyway, like slim marble towers reaching into the skies), and then the fantasy part introduces components that make those elements close to obsolete.

[tanis]

Yes and no. AD&D 2.0 had three damage types: bludgeoning, slashing, and piercing. That's a start.

First edition Pathfinder had weapon and armor integrity. Another piece.

I don't want to give too much away, but I think there is a way to fix things with tweaks and cleverness. At the same time, yeah, combat would still look quite different, regardless of how small the individual tweaks are, because the average RPG player's conception of how things work is fundamentally different than the physical reality. Spears would be a lot more common for one, as they were the dominant melee weapon on battlefields from the Paleolithic to the development of the socket bayonet. You wouldn't have silly two-handed mauls with unwieldably heavy heads being used as "warhammers" by human characters, etc. But the underlying fantasy doesn't really rely on that; people just have never known anything else, so they think it does.

D&D 5e has been a crucial part of the resurgence of tabletop RPGs over the past decade, and it has some genuine strengths over, say, 3.5; nevertheless, we can do better, and it's time to move on. If Wizards had cared more about the brand name than the mechanical brand, maybe they'd have done it, but now it's inevitable that people will make better games, and while those games probably won't replace D&D, they will supplement it, and provide an option for people who are looking for more from their games.