Have you ever played a traditional roleplaying game that actually was fun for combat alone?
I myself have found that only things specifically tuned for only combat have actually enjoyable combat and upgrade loops. Shit like necromunda and kingdom death.
Have you guys found any dungeons and dragons-oids or gurps-likes that actually have enjoyable combat?
4e is considered by many to have the most fun combat, as long as you are into the grid based tactics thing.
Strike! is an extreme streamlining of 4e's mechanics, taking some inspiration from other sources as well (XCOM for the cover system, for example).
I'd recommend checking them. They are by no means perfect, but the combat is pretty fun.
Roleplaying is much more fun than combat. Sure you might kill a few beholders in your tabletop career but you'll always remember that rat you kicked like a soccer ball at level 1.
>4E dnd
Dungeons and Dragons 4e is one, Legends of the Wulin is another. Both are very different games, but I enjoy the combat in each in and of itself.
I always find the distinction kind of pointless. Why stop roleplaying because you're in combat? Isn't how your character expresses themselves in moments of crisis, how they approach a conflict and how they cope in life and death situations also an opportunity to roleplay? Actions speak louder than words, after all.
Well, being able to roleplay in combat is nice, yeah. But I am looking for combat that is, at the least, fun to play without any roleplay. Then you can stack shit on top of it.
4e still works in that respect. Legends of the Wulin is tricky because it's an unusual beast, a crunchy mechanical system with narrativist sensibilities.
In LotW, how you fluff yourself in combat matters. Your characters personality, beliefs and ideals can matter just as much to their performance as weapons, combat style or spiritual strength, primarily through Chi Conditions and the Laughs/Fears system.
Laughs and Fears are the simpler of the two, tied to External Kung fu, your physical fighting style, and representing broad strengths or weaknesses of the style. Each Laugh or Fear is tied to a narrative descriptor, like Fearing being outnumbered or Laughing at confined spaces. Whenever you're in a situation which matches the clause, you take a penalty for the Fear or gain a bonus from the Laugh. They're relatively small modifiers, but figuring out how to an exploit an enemies Fear or avoid their Laughs clauses can still be a significant benefit in combat.
Chi Conditions are broader but still simple at the core. A Chi Condition is a narrative clause tied to a mechanical bonus or penalty. Obey the clause and get the bonus for positive ones, obey the clause or suffer the penalty for negative ones. Negative Chi Conditions are how the game does the damage system, while maintaining positive Chi Conditions as self-buffs is a pretty important thing for every character in the system.
Some of them can get very weird and esoteric, but Warriors Conditions are the simplest, just a fluff description of your combat style. It can be anything from drunken kung-fu giving you a mechanical bonus for describing yourself staggering around like a pissant, or one of the amusing examples in the core book of a Xia teacher who gains a bonus when lecturing his opponents on the flaws in their technique, making every battle a lesson.
I think you can see why I say that it's hard to divide the roleplay from the combat, as how you express your character has mechanical effects.
Also advocating 4e as the most fun 'mechanical' combat. Nothing competes, as far as I'm aware.
source?
I'm home now, ready and willing to challenge that opinion by shilling Strike! until I die of an autism induced stroke.
I'd also like to add to my previous post that Legend by Rule of Cool is actually pretty great, and basically 100% based around PvP.
And for a more unique experience maybe one of the games loosely based on something like the White wolf Street Fighter game, Trash or Fight!, are worth a look.
>Trash
*Thrash
My bad.
>Shit like necromunda and kingdom death.
You should chuck Gloomhaven into that category. It's a board game and not a roleplaying game (although you can roleplay during it if you wish) but it definitely meets what you're describing. Tightly designed gameplay, skill intensive mechanics, with an excellent upgrade loop stacked on top of a branching storyline and persistent world. A friend of mine described it as "80% of a D&D campaign but with better combat and no DM".
As for the main topic, 4e D&D is probably the closest I've ever played in that category although it has a number of failings. Feat taxes, poor scaling, samey classes in some areas, etc. I don't regret my time having played 4e D&D, but I'd never play it again imo.
4e D&D
Legends of the Wulin
FIGHT! The Fighting Game RPG
D&D 3.5. Seriously.
Secondarily, 4e, and 4e probably has better combat from a less biased viewpoint but I am one of those neo-grognards who can't accept 4e as an actual D&D edition.
AD&D combat is pretty fun just for the lethality and straight up simplicity of it. Damage is bounded, unlike 5e where DPS is fetishized above all else. It's a hackfest, sure, but it leaves more room for interpretation while maintaining the strictness and structure of an actual combat system.
Clooooone Drone Iiiiiiiiin the Danger Zone!
It's a game where you fight robots in an arena while robot commentators mock you and your humanity. Pretty fun, because you chop your enemies into bits.
On Steam now.
The problem with pure combat roleplaying is that it's just a wargame, not a roleplaying game. And since you're all on the same side accomplishing the same goal, the best course of action is to let the best strategist control all the characters. Anything else would be sub optimal, which is fine in a regular story driven ttrpg, but just pointless and unfulfilling when the only goal is the combat.
Basically the more fun you try to have, the worse you are going to perform mechanically. So if you're willing to sacrifice strategic play in order to roleplay and have fun. then it was pointless to play for combat alone.
There's a certain amount of fun in short games where the strategy isn't instantly decided, but playing any of these games more than a few times becomes extremely tedious because there is always only one best option for every decision and if you ever pick something else then you're just losing on purpose. Once you have a decent grasp of what cards/rolls/options are possible, then even randomness won't make it interesting. Either it's a solved game or it's a complete gamble.
> Feat taxes, poor scaling, samey classes in some areas, etc.
Strike! fixes those at least. It has its own, different share of problems admittedly.
OP seems to be looking for an RPG that's still an RPG, just combat is also actually enjoyable in itself.
So all of the "playing for combat alone" things are kinda hyperbolic.
Also, combat has so many factors that unless you present the literal exact same scenario every single time, there's no way it should get boring as long as players actually enjoy this stuff. You also assume complete information (which is needed for a game to be solved), which is a fairly large assumption to make.
What makes for a fun combat system in traditional rpgs? I know what I think makes them fun, but I want to see other perspectives to get a clearer vision of what's fun for others.
For me, the key to a fun combat system is the ability to make meaningful choices in combat.
If you're just going through the motions of rolling dice, with every action either clearly the right one to take or no choices at all, the actual mechanics of combat will be boring regardless of the context or how it's fluffed. Some people don't mind this, preferring a simple or fast resolution system to support the fluff, but for me those meaningful decisions are key to my enjoyment and investment in combat.
Of course, apart from that there are a lot of things which can stop combat being fun, even in an otherwise good system. If it drags on too long and becomes a bore, or sometimes if it ends up being too fast, resolved too quickly and simply without any nuance. Extreme imbalance can also be a factor, or if certain characters are just locked out of it entirely, whether intentionally or through some quirk of the rules.
Is teamwork and inter-reliance something that you find enjoyable and something worth including, something you're neutral on, or something you dislike?
Meaningful choices as in being able to do something more than "fighter swings sword" each round? Like, having multiple tools for multiple jobs?
Teamwork and benefits of cooperation is always good to have. Roleplaying games are cooperative, after all.
And part of it is making sure that 'Fighter swings sword' isn't the only thing you can do with a sword. D&D tried and failed to do this, with all its secondary actions in combat being almost universally worse than making an attack without insignificant investment. My ideal is that a combat system, before any character specific abilities or spent chargen resources, will still present each and every person involved with a breadth of options when faced with any typical situation, and that those options will be worth using.
However, balancing utility stuff like disarming or moving enemies against attacking them is really hard, since if you aren't attacking and doing HP damage, you aren't helping end the fight. I prefer the way LotW and 4e does it.
In LotW, its unique system of dicepools and multiple actions means that you can always make an attack, but extra sets in your pool let you make other actions too, and even without any additional Kung fu you still have plenty of secondary actions that can be very useful.
4e, meanwhile, made basically every ability in the game be 'Do damage And something else', quite neatly bypassing the problem of trying to balance the 'something else' against doing damage all on its lonesome.
That does pose a few questions though. Maybe introduce non-damage ways of ending a fight? Though I think the problem with that, things like non-lethal damage just become another flavor of "doing damage" and it winds up being different names for the same thing.
I had a system wherein there were 5 power sources for player characters, and monsters had vulnerabilities, resistances, and interactions with dealing and receiving effects and damage from those sources. For example, Golems are immune to magic, resist physical, but are vulnerable to mental and divine power. So, as part of a party composition you have to account for your ability to adapt to these sources.
To make a long post shorter, is making a combat option to change a player's power source, or modify its properties so that damage can be done, a meaningful choice, or is it an automatic one?
The idea that a player might be instantly locked out of a fight just because of a character generation choice, at least in a system like D&D, rubs me the wrong way.
Giving them some ability to improvise around it might make sense, but having to jump through hoops just to be able to participate at all doesn't exactly seem fun, y'know?
Fair point.
In another system, players have two forms, out of armor and in armor. While in armor they can spend a resource they gain from fighting called Drive on power and special shit. One thing that you can do instead of trying to smash through their defenses or hit an enemy is to drain away their Drive and make it so they get removed from their armor.
Is that just reflavoring damage, or does it have broader implications?
It's a potentially interesting dynamic. A powerful combat resource but also one you can lose access to if you spend it too recklessly or leave yourself vulnerable. My one worry would be that it would incentivize playing it safe and hoarding Drive to avoid losing the benefits of your armour, which could make combat more slow and dull.
Which, if I guess right that you're going for a Kamen Rider/Toku feel, isn't exactly appropriate.
Correct. So, for the idea I'm trying to present what exactly would go better with it? In an earlier system I made the characters gained Grit as they fought on, fighting spirit, and it just kept building as they fought at a linear rate. There was no penalty for hitting zero.
For this sytem, since I want the armor to be a big part of combat, obviously, but one thing I also want to bring to the fore as a theme is that these armors are linked to the wearer's will, which is why when their drive its forced past 0 they break.
I would gladly welcome any suggestions.
I think the idea you're currently running with could work, you just need consider ways to encourage people to be bold with the use of Drive.
Perhaps making generating it keyed to offensive, active actions rather than something passive to encourage people to not turtle, or even like Drive to a risk/reward mechanic, with a successful Drive enhanced possibly generating more.
I'd also make sure that even out of armour there are still options, even if they're less good. Because in a system like that I imagine one of the scenes you'd love to mechanically be able to capture is the final fight of Kuuga, that gloriously brutal bout of fisticuffs.
I guess I should explain more, though its hardly within the scope of the OP.
In the setting the players and people like them have the ability to manifest three psychic "items"; the Core (usually in the form of a fuel source or an engine) that provides Drive at all times, the Shell (the Armor in question), and the Shroud (a semi-controllable semi-corporeal manifestation of the user's subconscious, usually in the shape of clothing, cloaks, or wings and the like) which allows them to manifest the powers that use Drive.
There are less fortunate people in the world who cannot use all three creations, most can use only 1, and a rare few can use two, but only players and the people of their caliber can use all three.
So, that having been established, losing your Shell isn't the end of all things, but it does render you much more reliant on your Shroud and your CREDES (powers).
As for your suggestions, I would probably have a (low) baseline generation rate of Drive that gets heavily amplified by taking offensive action. I do like the idea of spending Drive into an attack rewarding more.
bump
Hey OP, does something like pic related sound fun to you?
4E, Strike, Legend, and Shadowrun.