Shortening combat

Lately I've been mulling over shortening combat in my games. Instead of playing things out round by round, the players and GM would set the stakes, roll, then narrate how the cookie crumbles. I was inspired by this game I found on Kickstarter (biohazardgamespublishing.com/qsystem-exerpts) as well as Burning Wheel's Versus rules.

I'd like to do this because I feel combat takes up way too much of the session's time and has way too many rules (5E, Savage Worlds, Numenera). Furthermore most conflicts really do only have two outcomes anyway, so why spend all that time beating around the bush? Either the bad guys kill/capture the PCs or the PCs capture/kill the bad guys. I hope that by creating a narrative solution beforehand, more creative outcomes can be had.

I had previously thought about just limiting the number of rounds each combat can be then eyeballing who has the most momentum, but then I wondered why even bother at all?

What do you think? Would you play in a game where combat is wrapped up without play-by-play rolls?

People play those games *for* the combat. They are pretty combat-centric.

You don't enjoy this style of play; which is fine. But if you are changing the most supported part of these games, you may as well switch games entirely instead of trying to homebrew a "fast combat" system into 5e, when characters are basically 80% about combat capability.

Check some PbtA games for faster combat resolution mechanics, or just play one of the games you mentioned as inspiration.

>Would you play in a game where combat is wrapped up without play-by-play rolls?
Have done, I've played games with single-roll combat, I've played games with no-dice combat, I've played games where the number of rolls you need depends largely on how each roll goes (but it was usually about 3-5), and I've played systems where combat takes almost an entire session

Got any specific recommendations? Burning Wheel is too rules-heavy for my group and Upwind isn't out yet.

I'm also interested in games where characters have more out-of-combat abilities. I agree D&D classes are 80% combat abilities but I don't know any better.

How'd it go? Did you like it or dislike it? Were there any immediate problems?

Give Apocalypse World a read. Combats are quite fast, and the outcomes are non-binary. If you like that style, you should look into Powered by the Apocalypse games in general to find something that suits your group.

>What do you think? Would you play in a game where combat is wrapped up without play-by-play rolls?
OP, did you check out The One Ring yet? It has simplified combat rules.

As for me, I don't get the whole shortening combat thing. I don't dislike combat, therefore I don't want it end ASAP.

>I agree D&D classes are 80% combat abilities but I don't know any better.
Read other systems. As a general rule you need to try at least 10 different systems before starting to do homebrew. It helps a lot. And I don't mean 10 variants of d20.

Check drivethrough for free rpgs. There is enough to get you started and maybe even finished. Add some classics - 7th Sea, World of Darkness, etc. And polish with light games a-la Risus.

The problem I have is that while combat isn't necessarily bad, it takes up a disproportionate amount of time. I feel like the ratio of story progress to time goes way way down whenever we start combat. It's like playing the game in slow motion.

>How'd it go? Did you like it or dislike it? Were there any immediate problems?

>single-roll combat
good for making the PCs seem competent since you roll, get the result and then the player describes how it went down, as such their character can act any way in the fight without it having much consequences so you get more characterisation stuff in fight scenes. A little simplistic for my taste though.

>No-dice combat
This was an interesting one, a diceless, GMless superhero rpg. Due to the nature of the system a victory for the PCs is a given (which is setting appropriate given that they're supposed to be justice league level heroes) but what matters is the side-effects, collateral damage, resources expended, allies harmed, that sort of thing. Cool for focusing on the consequences instead of the fight itself but not something I'd run for anything other than a one-shot for something a bit different.

>Systems where combat takes the entire session
These are generally the ones which go into really detailed blow-by-blow accounts of combat, of the sort you seem to be used to so I won't elaborate further. In my opinion good if you enjoy that sort of thing but not my cup of tea.

>where the number of rolls you need depends largely on how each roll goes
Awkward wording I know but the best way to describe it, this is mainly PbtA games and is my personal preference. Each roll doesn't just affect hp but also the relative positions of all combatants, who's in a position of strength and who's in a tough spot. It can take a little practice but once the GM gets the knack for running it you can have really great fights where the circumstances constantly evolve so no one's on top for too long and it really feels like a struggle.

I run 5e for a group of new players, and I find that things generally work better when I give the monsters 2/3 to around half the HP the monster manual gives them. This generally means combats end before they stop being exciting. And it gives me more flexibility to use higher CR monsters, so things stay fresh for everybody. I usually leave the monster's damage the same, so it's fast-paced, high-stakes.

Well, yes. You're taking a time-out from the overarching story and focus on the current situation instead. Without this, roleplaying becomes (to a substantial degree), delayed story-telling. Instead of narrating a plot unilaterally in 10 to 15 minutes, it becomes a 4 hours interactive story arc in which the players slowly discover the plot based on what their characters do.

If that's what you want, more power to you. It's too limiting for me. I want it all, not just discovering the plot and the backstory of characters.

>where the number of rolls you need depends largely on how each roll goes
90% of systems out there fall under this.

>It's too limiting for me
But don't the combat rules themselves limit you?

>90% of systems out there fall under this.
I know but I wasn't sure how else to word it, what I meant more specifically was systems where the combat rolls also affect other circumstances other than just damage, ergo if you get several good rolls you can end a hard fight easily, or if you get mixed rolls it can drag on a lot

In most cases, enemies should go down in 1-3 hits, and the average chance of hitting them should be somewhere in the 60%-70% range.

PCs, on the other hand, should probably be more in the 3-4 hit range, with greater resources at their disposal to avoid, mitigate, and/or heal wounds.

If you avoid complicated rules for special maneuvers (like grappling) and just wing things off of a basic attack score (and a player's description of what they're doing), and impel your players to act quickly (start pressuring them to tell you what they do at c. 10 seconds unless they're actively asking questions and such), combat can go by pretty quickly.

>I'm also interested in games where characters have more out-of-combat abilities. I agree D&D classes are 80% combat abilities but I don't know any better.
Low-level old school D&D adventures are actually pretty interesting, because it's so deadly that you're incentivised to avoid combat whenever possible (or to only engage when you're worked things to your advantage somehow, with an ambush, etc.), especially since you get almost all of your XP from gold and not killing monsters. I mean, you used to die at 0 hp, and a magic-user would start off with 1-4 hp.

>Instead of narrating a plot unilaterally in 10 to 15 minutes
Do you still do pre-planned GM storylines or do you do the PbtA "play to see what happens" style? Because even without combat the latter is very far from unilateral narration.

well, that's a desired self-limitation. rules exist so that a game isn't pure GM's calvinball/continual asspull.

no, i meant this:
without combat and such, with a heavy focus on storyline, games can be like a drawn-out, interactive version of what otherwise could have been a story that could have been told in 10 minutes by any speaker.

some trail of cthulhu scenarios are like this. the players slowly discover what is going on, hardly any die-rolling going on, not much of a challenge. if you'd skip the player-GM back&forth and told the story straight forward "you then discover this and go there"), it would take 10 to 15 minutes for the entire scenario.

Oh, and don't forget to roll for morale. Very few people in history fought to the death to the very last man. If the PC's gain the upper hand, there's a good chance the enemies will retreat or flee. All it takes is for one person to break and run and that shit can become contagious. Think of it this way, if you and a half dozen of your friends engaged an enemy and two of your friends got killed while all of your enemies were still standing strong, wouldn't you start to think that discretion was the better part of valor?

Single roll reslution can be good, but it really depends on the focus and setting of the game.
What you might want is something like either Apocalypse World or Shinobigami.

Apocalypse World's combat isn't a sub-system, but the combat-specific moves fit in seamlessly with the other moves.
The moves also don't care about what you do, but why you do it. Forcing someone to do something with violence (go aggro) is different from taking control of something with violence (seize by force) and has a different set of consequences.
These consequences are set up so that you almost never get everything you want and so that the immediate situation changes significantly.
Additionally, both moves are tied to a single stat, so being good at violence is just one option and not a necessity.

Shinobigami has a fairly rigid scene structure and for each scene, the players can pick either drama or combat.
Combat is very quick thanks to only lasting for as many rounds as you have participants (with fights being mostly 1-on-1) and a single point of damage being enough to knock a character out of a scene.

Nice dubs, I think I'll look into Shinobigami.

I have Dungeon World and it looks really intriguing, but I just can't quite wrap my head around it, especially fronts and progress clocks.

Dungeon World is a bad example because its creators didn't quite grasp why and how Apocalypse World works. As a result, it kind of ineffectually flops around on ground that's neither Apocalypse World nor Dungeons & Dragons.

To quote the AW rulebook:
A front is a set of linked threats. Threats are people, places and
conditions that, because of where they are and what they’re
doing, inevitably threaten the players’ characters — so a front
is all of the individual threats that arise from a single given
threatening situation.

Fronts are a codified way of coming up with antagonists for the PCs. Creating a front boils down to asking yourself
>Who are they?
>What do they want to do?
and
>What will they do if left to their own devices?
For the latter, you have progress clocks representing particular events or courses of action. They are something you, as the GM, can fall back on to move the "plot", as it were, along. If something happened to speed the necromancer's plan to amass an undead army along, fill in the appropriate segments. If nothing happened, you can just fill in a segment anyway and show a village getting overrun by undead.

I've been examining a diceless system myself, planning to run a game using it once my schedule calms down. This one is a far-future game where the PCs are all either ridiculously tech-enhanced or have lots of narrative power (it's built into character gen--you can put as many points into tech enhancement as you want, but certain thresholds of enhancement impose increasing limitations on the PCs narrative power). Instead of focusing on the idea of weighing the costs of winning with collateral damage and expended resources, this one incentivizes the PCs to pick and choose their battles learn about their opponents ahead of time, and try to manipulate the circumstances of a battle to put their opponent at as much of a disadvantage as possible.

This is a lot clearer, thank you! The Dungeon World book makes it seem like this really complex, specific process of every front basically being an essay outline.

I'm really interested in quick, low prep games that aren't guided by a pre-built GM story. I'm tired of the amount of prep required to play ie PF or 5E, and I'm not talking about the AIDS medication or am I

Yeah, it's no coincidence that there's a fan-written guide to DW that's basically considered mandatory reading. Most of DW consists of the authors thinking they understood AW and then failing to properly explain what they did with it.

What do you mean by "pre-built GM story"? Adventure modules?

Adventures modules or the GM writing a novel and either railroading the players or throwing out all that work (homemade modules, I guess).

I want to give the party a seed and see where we take it together.

For any game of DW I would consider using Perilous Wilds a must
>formalises the vague 'collaborative world-building' found in DW
>provides actual rules for Dungeon Crawling and Hirelings
>turns is from a generic fantasy game into a game about exploring a fantasy world and the discoveries you make and dangers you encounter along the way

It turns is from a weird in-between generic game into essentially Ryutaama PbtA with dungeon crawls

Well, Apocalypse World and Shinobigami are perfect for your purposes then.

Just note that Shinobigami is made for one-shots. There are rules for character improvement between sessions, but every session is basically a self-contained episode.
You set up a Prize for the scenario, give each character an open motivation and a hidden secret. From there, each player gets to create three scenes and the session culminates in an all-out fight during the Climax Phase.

>It turns is from a weird in-between generic game into essentially Ryutaama PbtA with dungeon crawls
That sounds a bit too good to be true. Especially since it doesn't seem to fix the core fuck-ups of DW.

Skid djd jD dns bad

...

>That sounds a bit too good to be true. Especially since it doesn't seem to fix the core fuck-ups of DW
The core moves are still bland however the 'undertake a perilous journey' move becomes a lot more fun, the roles PCs take become more specific and there's mechanics for discovering strange new things in the world as you travel, and also a good chance of running into danger. It doesn't make the basic game-play any better you're right but it does do a good job making exploring and world-building interesting.

Seems like it would be more useful slotted into AW 2e.

As others have said, just play a different game. Everway is one I'm going to run quite soon and this way of doing combat is encouraged. It has Fire, Earth, Air and Water scores that represent your abilities (up to 10, 3 being the average human and 10 being demigod), as well as powers and magic which are fairly free form and allow you to do more specialized things like going invisible. For combat and anything else that has some randomness it goes like:
>the players say what they're planning and what they intend to do (fighting a dragon, one says he will lure its fire while the rest attack, the rest say how they attack and what powers they use if any).
>the GM decides what is the most likely outcome (the character drawing its fire has a decent earth score (5) but the dragon's fire score (7) is much higher, so the character will likely die unless they happened to have immunity to heat and fire, or some kind of super dexterity power etc. The other heroes have enough fire which is used for combat to probably kill the dragon, but maybe not before the distraction dies and it can move its attention to them).
>the GM draws a fortune (tarot-like) card and decides how that affects the outcome. The Phoenix--reversed for example, has the meaning of Destruction and cards usually describe the players' side of things (i.e. reversed cards are usually bad for the players, normal ones good for them) so this may mean they will all die following that plan. However, with such a strong earth score, the one that tries to distract it may still survive the first breath of fire and warn the others to run. If one has a good water score (sensibility, wisdom etc.) they may be able to predict where the dragon will breathe next and do stuff based on that, etc.

cont

It's all up to the GM and how they read the situation and the cards, but I do like the simplistic way of representing characters with 4 scores. A big complaint I have with D&D is that every feature is defined by its combat use, i.e. Fast Hands does nothing out of combat when logically, it should. It is super focused on combat and has entirely different mechanics for the rest of the game.

There's a huge difference between railroading and the story seed sandbox method or whatever, but many campaigns are neither. I'd say the seed is unique to story games, PbtA games and so on where the GM doesn't prep, in DnD you can still have non-rail-roady adventures and really cool player-driven narratives but without just starting with a seed.

This actually sounds really cool, definitely looking into it. I've wanted to run a tarot style game for awhile.

I kind of just want to craft an initial setup (you all booked passage on the same airship, and it's under attack) and establish a few major threats (the Empire, the dragon, whatever) and see where the players and I take it from there.

One thing that fascinates me about PbtA is the idea of the players and GM making moves back and forth against each. And in Dungeon World in particular (not sure if it's in Apocalypse World too) is the idea of asking questions and using the answers, like the wizard is the expert on magic so see what he thinks, etc.

>A big complaint I have with D&D is that every feature is defined by its combat use, i.e. Fast Hands does nothing out of combat when logically, it should. It is super focused on combat and has entirely different mechanics for the rest of the game.
that is because D&D, as claimed many times before, has a gamist system, not a simulationist one.

Anything interesting in Dungeon World you can also find in Apocalypse World.
The creators didn't add anything of worth, they just fucked up some stuff.

Incidentally, there's a preview of Apocalypse World 2e consisting of playbooks and some additional moves that let you play AW as a fantasy game. If you want to play fantasy PbtA, that's the way to go.