Do you prefer your combat systems to have high or low amounts of situational bonuses?

Do you prefer your combat systems to have high or low amounts of situational bonuses?

How much do you think you should be able to compensate for an opponent with better stats, skills, equipment, etc., by superior positioning, attacking from the sides and rear, greater ability to maneuver, and the like?

Situational bonuses & penalties make for better roleplaying than hard-coded 'powers' and 'maneuvers' do. AD&D had that right. Called shots, tripping, pushing and pulling, grapling mid combat, sand in the eyes, slicing his belt off....those things were covered by THAC0 and some situational penalties and binuses. You didn't have to have feats and didn't suffer attacks of opportunity for them, you could just DO them. And when you had casters that couldn't instantly cast everythign in a single action, but had to wait for long, terrifying seconds as they worked the spell to a conclusion, not knowing if the monster would reach them and hurt them and ruin the spell....fighters actually were incredibly powerful in AD&D. WotC destroyed them.

Low numbers of bonuses, but they're constantly changing.

Low. There are too fucking many of them already and both the GM and players keep forgetting half of them anyway.

And it drags down the pacing and excitement of combat (unless you're playing a slow game of hunt-the-sniper or something).

medium to high, depends how well they are ordered

Don't kid yourself, fighters were 'alright' in AD&D only by merit of their amazing saves and the fact that HP wasn't nearly as bloated, so their staying power was comparably great. Mages and Clerics completely shit on them come mid-late game, but I'm sure there'll be some dumb grog mewling about how games never got that far. Even still though, back in the day you were still better off just dealing damage 99% of the time, which is the real crux of the discussion; how to make these options as good as progressing the enemy toward death.

To answer the OP, I would like a system that did a good job encouraging that kind of thinking, but there don't seem to be any really. The ones that do have those options seem to vacillate between forcing you to spec into one aspect like tripping, and that's all you do, or having everyone default to damage when it's obvious that all tripping does is give you a minor bonus or slow them down a little. As it stands now, I prefer lower amounts of situational bonuses more easily applied when needed for the sake of speed.

Actually, you would be right, if casters in midgame weren't 11th or 14th level when the fighters hit 20th. Casters could do amazing things - as long as their two round spellcastign didn't get them killed by things that had a percentage chance to literally see invisible monsters and a percentage change to ignore every spell at that time. Magic resistance and seeing invisible were monster traits that could shut down the two most powerful abilities of any caster flat, and two rounds to cast high level spells (or even three if they had a low dex and a bad initiative roll) made fighters all the more valuable to them.

None of which really mattered by that point. Invis is awesome at low levels, but at high levels you rely more on things like misdirection and defensive spells that scale well, like mirror image or stoneskin. Magic resistance was also nothing more than a speedbump, unless the mage forgot to bring either summons or the loadout to use tenser's transformation.

Even more than mages though, I've always felt clerics stepped on the fighter's toes even harder, since their later buffs make them melee damage machines on top of healing/other buffs/summoning.

There were additional system quirks that made it much better than abominations like 3.5, but I've always been rustled at the disparity.

Having situational bonuses is what makes combat interesting and cinematic. It makes people's descriptions of their actions meaningful instead of just window dressing. But you shouldn't be tallying up a dozen different modifiers off tables. They should be mostly improvised by the GM, who should generally lean more heavily on actions and positioning than on common environmental modifiers.

So I'd say that applying some sort of situational modifier should be extremely common, but you shouldn't be ticking off a bunch of different modifiers in any given situation.

>Actually, you would be right, if casters in midgame weren't 11th or 14th level when the fighters hit 20th.
Mid-game is level 20? Shit, you're lucking if *anybody* *ever* makes it to level 10.

Normally low, because it's so easy to forget about things like how dark the room is or how much cover tgat specific bush was offering.

I did, however like the Dresden Files RPG when I played it once. You could either beat an enemy by attacking it once for each health point (health pools were fairly low) it had or have the party stack a HUGE pile of situational modifiers to OHKO the foe.

>Do you prefer your combat systems to have high or low amounts of situational bonuses?
Medium. Not helpful, I guess, but I like a balance.

>How much do you think you should be able to compensate for an opponent with better stats, skills, equipment, etc., by superior positioning, attacking from the sides and rear, greater ability to maneuver, and the like?
A slightly weaker opponent should be able to compensate for it. But I don't want high-level PCs easily overcome by 12 peasants with pitchforks. Also I don't want level 1 PCs to gang up on and kill a dragon. That is reserved for higher levels.

Low. It's why I like 5e and the whole advantage/disadvantage thing they've got going on.

I know that situational bonuses would probably be the more mechanics-friendly way of doing things but I just can't be arsed to actually track that stuff. Cover bonuses are enough.

>To answer the OP, I would like a system that did a good job encouraging that kind of thinking, but there don't seem to be any really.

how about Runequest 6? I heard good things about it. anyway, too many tactical options slow down combat speed more than anything else (as people mull options). more than dice rolls or having many modifiers.

...

Very low. Advantage system of 5e is my favorite thing atml, or the boon/bane +1d6 to your roll of Shadow of the Demon Lord.

I play with people that have extremely low system mastery/game sense, so this works. And honestly, I have trouble remembering all those little +es, would rather have something quicker.

>Situational bonuses & penalties make for better roleplaying than hard-coded 'powers' and 'maneuvers' do.

The two aren't mutually exclusive.

In fact, 4e has a fuckload of situational modifiers.

Situational modifiers are always best when it's small numbers that are semi-static.

At most, you should be getting bonuses from three different sources, otherwise you run the risk of turning the game into a check balancing simulator like 3.PF was.

The entirety of GURPS is finding modifiers. It's too much of a hassle to remember lighting penalties and such with all the other modifiers in combat.

OP here, that wasn't quite what I meant.

Take DnD for an example. (Any edition, it won't really matter) Suppose you had a 2nd level fighter trying to fight with a 6th level fighter. Short of the 6th level guy being tied up and naked, there's almost no way for the 2nd level guy to win. Even if he gets total surprise, he'll get a few extra attacks before the higher level guy turns around and butchers him with more HP, more likely to hit, and depending on the edition, probably more attacks and/or other tricks up his sleeve that the lower level guy doesn't have.

It's certainly possible, however, to design a game where supposing that low level guy gets total surprise, of him being able to launch a devastating attack in the gap where he can move and the other guy doesn't. One of the old-school systems I play occasionally, Dragonquest, is built along those lines. You could be the best swordsman in the world, but if someone gets behind you and isn't so incompetent they're at risk of stabbing themselves in the foot, even someone with much lower combat stats can hurt or kill you; the differences between weapon ranks is relatively small compared to the huge bonuses you get for being behind an opponent, or if he's sitting or prone or the like.


It's less about the number of different bonuses, it's about the magnitude of the ones you've got.

t. Generation Z

D&D is not a game that is built around the underdogs pulling off some indiana jones type shit and kill a level 20 dragon through wits and diplomacy.

It's a game where the higher number wins, no exceptions. If you want a game where the dude with the highest stats can still be ganked by a low level scrub, there are plenty of systems that facilitate that constant threat of danger.

But D&D is not one of those games.

BRP based games are an example of that

My mind's drawing a blank, what does BRP mean again?

Yes, which is why I asked if you preferred games with high levels of situational bonuses vs high levels of intrinsic ones. I'm well aware of what DnD is.

Basic Role Playing.

I'm honestly curious, could you list a few? Wanting to try more than just the few that our local group has been doing.

Which I already answered earlier.

So what's your problem?

Of the games I've played.

>All Flesh Must Be Eaten
>Apocalypse World
>Paranoia

Though I'm fairly sure that some other anons have better examples than I do.

System of Call of Cthulhu, Runequest, etc.

Harnmaster. Rolemaster to some degree (lucky crit). Cyberpunk 2020.

Because your response in has nothing to do with either the OP nor post

I really like situational bonuses/penalties. I like being able to triumph over massively powerful enemies by outsmarting them or suffering for dumb mistakes.

I recognize the downside is that it can potentially add a lot of extra numbers to track, but that's something you can work around once you sorta get the hang of it.

BRP doesn't use normal situational modifiers, it uses non-linear roll modifiers done in steps (at least RuneQuest 6 does).

I find changing the target number by a fraction is much better than typical modifiers.